


Cryoablation

by Pemm



Series: there is a season [2]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:45:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 29
Words: 93,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>[BOOK II: WINTER]</b>
</p><p><b>cry·o·ab·la·tion,</b> n. (kri″o-ab-la´shun) —<br/>the removal of tissue by destroying it with extreme cold.</p><p>Protect the flames with your hands, if you must. But don’t be surprised when the blisters form, or when you cease to feel the pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1: Fatigue

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> **Sequel to[Sparkler](http://archiveofourown.org/works/529396/chapters/938003).  
> **  
>  Please be aware that much of this story will not make sense without that context!  
> 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**ACT I.  
THE MARTYR**

 

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” 

 _—Mere Christianity_ ,  
C.S. Lewis.

 

* * *

 

### 1\. fa·tigue _|fəˈtēg|_
    
    
    1. extreme tiredness, typically resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness.  
    
    2. weakness in materials, esp. metal, caused by repeated variations of stress.

 

* * *

 

The only warning they got as they barreled into RED territory was the faintest whiff of rubber and sulfur, and something red hanging in the corners. The moment the smell curled up to his brain the Engineer threw himself back out the door and into the snow, raising his toolbox like a shield. The Pyro, blinkered by lenses and nose-dead to anything but smoke and asbestos, had no such luck.

There was a blinding flash of light as the sticky-bombs went off, and the Engineer heard a muffled scream and a thump. He cussed, scuttled back behind the chain-link fence that formed a short corridor outside the RED base, and threw down his toolbox. By the time the RED demolitions expert came trotting out to look for him, there was a sentry waiting.

Hunkered down behind his machine, the BLU engineer—one Dell Conagher, forty-three years old and without so much as a gray hair to show for it—watched as the demoman backpedaled. The sentry tracked his movements, beeping in alarm and spitting bullets, but it only ran a spray of holes up the wall as it chased him back into the building.

Dell bit his lip, rubbing his gloved hands together. His breath was coming out in silvery puffs of heat, and just pulling his sentry up had taken him a full three seconds longer than usual. This new station had them parked in the middle of Alaska somewhere, or maybe even Canada, he wasn’t sure. Either way, it was _cold_ , and that wasn’t something his machines were built for. Neither was he.

In the distance, he could hear the shouting and screaming that came standard with any day on his job. The rest of the BLU mercenaries had stayed behind to hold the middle territory they’d only just taken. It had been the Pyro’s idea for them to go ahead and try to push the RED team back further.

(Alright, no. What the Pyro had really done was manage was find a damn butterfly in the snow. An honest-to-God butterfly. She had chased it along its path toward the RED base, and Dell tailed her.)

So now he was alone, his nearest teammate probably caught up in the jaws of the respawn system. Dell rubbed at his arms through the thin fabric of his coat and looked around. Would he have a better chance if he pulled out his shotgun now, or should he distill its ammo down into the sentry?

The decision was made for him when the sentry spun around entirely, beeping up a riot. Dell scrambled out of its line of fire half a second before it started shooting. Behind him, and he must have come out through the other end of the building, the RED demoman was edging around a corner. The nose of that all-too-familiar grenade launcher stuck out at an angle just right to roll its payload into his flimsy shelter.

Dell cussed and fumbled for his shotgun, fingers numb and stupid. _Damn_ the cold, he wouldn’t be able to make it clear of the blast like this if he tried. Kicking up snow, he scrambled away until his back hit cement and chain-link, and covered his head.

Shrapnel ripped into him as the sentry went to pieces. He tasted blood. When his ears stopped ringing he could hear the demoman was hooting with laughter. Had he remembered to reload his gun after emptying it on the enemy spy, just before the Pyro had taken off? No time to check. The demoman rounded the corner, wielding not his usual shattered whiskey bottle but a nine-iron that shone hard and cold in the winter sunlight.

The RED raised the nine-iron with a vicious grin. Dell lifted his gun.

A dark shape materialized behind the demoman. The demoman stepped forward.

The shape lifted its arms and swung down the sledgehammer in its hands.

Dell had always heard about desensitization to violence, and had found it by and large to be true. Ten years in the oil fields had done that for him well enough to start. Working for the Builder’s League United had only cemented it, ensuring he and all his teammates all saw dozens of sickening deaths every day. Once his own sentry’s rockets had misfired on impact and he was rewarded with a blow-back of gore that painted him so red his team had shot at him—another time he’d had his own wrench crammed entirely down his throat. He still had nightmares about that.

In spite of all of that, he still winced when the demoman’s head caved in.

The RED dropped. The Pyro slammed the sledgehammer into his neck again, blood and spinal fluid spraying into the air and splattering the snow. Relaxing her grip on the hammer, she tilted her head to one side, then nudged him with the toe of her boot. When he didn’t move she made a disappointed sort of sound, slinging the weapon back into her belt.

Dell let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He popped open the shotgun’s barrel and looked inside: empty.

He didn’t even get to look up before the Pyro rushed into him, catching him up in a blood-splattered hug. The gun fell from his hands. An instant later she was off again, investigating the remains of the sentry. Dell shook himself and tried to flick off some of the brain she’d gotten on his overalls before picking the gun back up. “Thanks, Smoky.”

He got a vague noise in response. She didn’t look much worse for the wear, despite catching the brunt of the blast. There was a tear on the back of her chemsuit, and a dangerous-looking dent in her oxygen tank, neither of which he had the means to do anything about out here. Instead he knelt and started picking through the scrap of his sentry for salvageable parts. The Pyro looked over her shoulder toward the RED base, having lost interest. “Hhrs HHD?” _Where’s RED?_

“Plannin’ their counterattack, I reckon. Dunno what the demo was thinkin’, comin’ after both of us like that. C’mon, let’s get while the gettin’s good.”

“Hh hwanna fhind thmm.” She squared her shoulders and stomped her foot, glaring at him. At least he figured it was a glare. Time was that’d bring him kind of a smile, a hope, seeing some of her old attitude crop up. Right now—with the cold and his broken sentry and with no sign of backup on the way—it was just irritating. 

“You wanna go get yourself killed, be my guest,” he snapped, stuffing the metal parts into his now-dented toolbox. One sliced his hand clean through the glove, and his temper flared. He cussed, ripped off the glove, and stuck the bleeding edge of his palm in his mouth for a few seconds. The cold nipped at his fingertips. “Don’t know why I followed you in the first place,” he said when he pulled his hand out again. “Sure, go. I’m sure their pyro ain’t got enough to do without you lightin’ his team on fire. Or, or go—go give their sniper some damn target practice, he needs it.” His voice had gotten loud enough it surprised even him. “I don’t know why I even bother talking to you like you’re a person anymore. You ain’t got a clue what I’m sayin’, do you?”

As he slammed the toolbox shut and turned to head back for the middle control point, he made the mistake of looking at her. She stood there with her hands curled in front of her, picking at the rubber of her gloves. Slack-shouldered, knees touching, head to one side—she looked like a bewildered child.

“Hhenhgneer?” she said, soft, as he stormed past. “Hhenghy?”

He was too angry to take it back, even though he knew he wouldn’t get to apologize. By the time he’d have cooled off, she would have already forgotten.

 

* * *

  

The mess quieted a little when Dell walked in, ten minutes late for dinner. It bounced back almost at once as he fetched food and a beer. When he took his place by the Pyro she paid him no attention, too busy building a tipi out of stolen forks. “So,” he said, popping the lid off his bottle with the table’s edge and looking around at his teammates, “no progress.”

“Almost had it this morning,” Scout said around a mouthful of corn. “Heck, I did have it, I was like twenty seconds off gettin’ fourth once, back-cap y’know, then the freakin’ medic pops his stupid head out up on the stairs with his dumb crossbow. The medic!” He slammed his fist on the table. The Pyro’s fork tipi teetered dangerously. “I dunno how he even got me with the stupid thing, lucky shot or something, can you freakin’ believe that crap?”

“Sure can,” Sniper said, smirking into his coffee. “You were standing there makin’ faces at the man, you were.” Scout just rolled his eyes and shoved more food into his mouth. “S’alright, I got him after.”

“Whebn’d you sho’up?”

“Just a bit before he got you in the eye.”

Scout winced, screwing up his face at the thought. He swallowed. “Ugh, not while I’m freakin’ eatin’, alright, gimme a break, don’t think I needed to know that. I _like_ my respawn amnesia.”

“Still,” Dell continued, “no progress. Holding middle—barely—but we’ve been holding it for a month now. Month and a week, even.” He glanced around at his teammates. “Y’all look about as tired as I am. We got to get us a new strategy.”

“Hey I didn’t see you helpin’ us none, where were you?” Scout pointed his fork at Dell, one eyebrow raised. “Coulda used that damn sentry when their heavy came down off the cliff, yeah?”

“CORRECT!” bellowed Soldier, slamming both palms flat on the table and leaning forward. The whole team flinched. The coffee in Sniper’s mug leapt, and the Pyro’s tipi jumped apart, forks clattering to the floor. She made a distressed noise and dove down after them, leaving Dell on his own. “Where were you, soldier?” Soldier demanded, his helmet far up enough for him to glare at Dell from under it. “Cowering in respawn? Fraternizing with the enemy?! _Deserting the line of duty?!_ UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR—”

Heavy reached across the table and slid the helmet down over Soldier’s eyes. Soldier kept yelling, but the gunman’s bass rumble drowned it out. “Engineer and Pyro, I have seen them advancing toward the RED base. Calm down.”

He glanced over at Dell, who had pushed up his goggles to rub at one eye. A headache was creeping in at the edge of his senses. “Passed you on the way back, yeah. Me an’ Pyro went ahead, thought we’d see what their reinforcements were lookin’ like.” Heavy nodded, slow and ponderous, and lightly pushed Soldier back toward his seat. He fell into it with a thump, the helmet’s straps flying. “Had a run-in with their demoman, but Pyro took care of it.”

As if on cue, the Pyro clambered back up into her seat, hands full of silverware. She looked around at the table for a moment, at the rest of the team watching her, before raising one fist. “Hhhdhrh!”

“Aye, good on ye, laddie. Sorry boot-lickin’ farce o’ a demolitions man, him,” Demo said with a grin. The Pyro nodded, and Dell felt his mood sour as he looked at her. He’d bet money she didn’t have any idea what had just been said. It was a wonder she got by as well as she did, given she could barely string sentences together anymore.

It got old, was all, when he was the one that had to put up with her all the time. She never wanted to be around anyone else, or at least that was how it felt. When she tried to take his fork straight out of his hand to add to her project a few minutes later, he scarcely kept himself from snapping at her.

The rest of dinner passed without incident, if Dell didn’t include Scout threatening to jam his bat down Spy’s throat for some lewd suggestions about his mother and the RED spy. (He didn’t. That happened on a daily basis.) As kitchen duty fell to Medic and Soldier for the night, Dell was able to slip away, down the aptly-named Coldfront base’s dim hallways. It was a far cry from Teufort, or even Dustbowl or Harvest—the whole complex was frigid, poorly maintained, and dark.

The space he’d claimed for himself and his machines was well on the other end of the base from everything else, and he liked it that way. It was quieter. Of course, that made the electric hum the room’s lights gave off even louder, just loud enough that it was difficult to tune them out. After a month and a half of it he’d gotten used to them as a kind of white noise, but in the late, empty hours he preferred to work in it was jarring at best. They buzzed to life when he flipped the switch, and he made his way to his workbench.

A mess of gears and wires and metal greeted him on the workbench. Dell stared for a second or two before shoving most of it off to one side, suddenly unmotivated. The idea of trying—again—to cold-proof his teleporters wasn’t appealing. Neither was the thought of field-testing them in the snow for the _n_ th time. He flicked a stray wing nut off the scratched wood and cast his gaze around the room.

It was big, at least. Compared to the workshops he had at most of the other bases it was downright spacious. A sturdy wooden workbench stood beneath huge windows that faced southeast and flooded the room with light during the day, and a smaller one on the opposite wall made for a fine place to stow anything he might need it to.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, the door locked. 

He glanced back at the workbench, then knelt down to look at the shelves beneath. It took only a moment to find what he sought. He dragged the cardboard box out from under the bench and hefted it onto the top. It tipped over the second he let go of it, the cardboard warped and weak, and out spilled scrap metal that was by now so familiar he could almost tell the pieces apart by touch. For a long ten seconds he just looked at it, then plucked out a jag of metal between his gloved fingers. It gleamed in the humming lights as he turned it over in his hand. With a shake of his head he dropped it and started sweeping all of it back into the box labeled _Pyro’s Dispenser_.

Bad habit, this was, pulling the damn thing out whenever he couldn’t find anything else to do. It was unhealthy. He was shoving the last piece of blue casing into the box when there came a knock at the door. Dell ignored it, and it came again, more insistent. A muffled “Yo, hardhat!” followed.

Dell heaved a harsh sigh as he stowed the box back under the workbench and went to answer the door. Scout’s inane chatter wasn’t exactly what he had in mind as far as distractions went. In two and a half years the boy had scarcely matured a whit—and he hadn’t hardly grown any, either. At his age, twenty-something, it wasn’t such a big gap in the first place, but respawn had kept him looking almost the same as the day Dell had met him. Not that such couldn’t be said for them all; just on Scout it was most obvious.

The door’s hinges creaked. Scout was tapping his foot, an impatient staccato. “Hey,” he started before it was even open all the way, “Engie, man, c’mon what gives?”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Said you’d help me figger out what’s the deal with my gun, said you’d meet me after dinner out in the firin’ range this mornin’, what, you forget?”

“I did say that, didn’t I.” Dell exhaled. His head hurt. “I did forget. Sorry, Scout. Alright. G’wan, get, I’ll be there in a minute.”

Scout grinned and touched the bill of his hat before speeding off. Dell hung in the doorway a moment, watching.

 

* * *

 

The scattergun felt too cold in his hands. It was dinged and scuffed, too, like everything else Scout owned. Being the youngest of eight sons probably didn’t make one familiar with owning anything worth keeping nice.

Dell turned it over, then reached up to move his goggles from his eyes. “You did unload this thing, right?”

“What, ‘course I did, you think I’m stupid?” Scout said, even as Dell popped the weapon open to check. He gave Dell a smug look when it proved empty. Dell ignored him and lifted his goggles up to his forehead. “See, right like that, sheesh. Wouldn’t even matter, what, so you blow off a couple fingers, you gotta respawn yourself—”

“Which I’d just as soon avoid. So you’re tellin’ me this thing’s misfiring?”

His voice echoed in the old barn they had come to call the firing range. It stood some ways out from the base, far enough that its distance made it ideal for muffling gunfire. Frozen bales of forgotten, moldy hay were perfect for target practice, and there were plenty of them. Dell had hoped to avoid the damn place for a while longer than this, though; his sentries had seemed to finally quit gumming up in the cold with his latest adjustments. He was sick of testing them out here.

Scout nodded. Well. He nodded, and leaned forward, and started gesticulating wildly as he explained. “Cuz I mean it’s weird, like, it ain’t ever been a thing before, broke weapons an’ like that, cuz respawn always fixes it somehow? Like I’m thinkin’ maybe it’s the cold? But yeah like two days ago damn thing just quit on me, middle of the point, I was lucky I got outta there cuz their pyro was comin’ at me, shootin’ those stupid flares, got me in the friggin’ leg the little shit, hey, yeah, you was there, I went ‘round the corner there and it was you an’ your stuff.” He stopped for breath, approximately a tenth of a second. “So’s—basically I don’t actually know, y’know I mean if it quit in th’middle of a fight an’ got me killed I ain’t gonna remember none, coulda been doin’ this since we got here, see.”

Dell saw. The observation was more than he expected out of the boy in general. “Right,” he said, inspecting the mechanisms. “Receiver looks fine. The action too. Heck, I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it. You got your ammo?”

“Way ahead’a you,” Scout said, already rolling a pair of shells between his fingers. As Dell took them out of his hand, Scout nudged his messenger bag with a foot, half-stowed under the sawhorses they were using as seats. “I got a bunch, I mean it worked fine this mornin’, it don’t quit all the time. Hey I bet you can’t hit that bottle off that beam, heck, how’d that even get up there? You think Demo’s—”

Dell dropped his goggles back down over his eyes and pulled the trigger. The gun boomed into the quiet of the evening, busting a hay bale two yards away into half its original size. Another squeeze of the trigger and it was smithereens, and so were the next two he aimed for. Dell hummed low in his throat when he ran out of shots, then squatted down to pull more shells from Scout’s bag.

The next few minutes were nothing but the bang of Scout’s gun as Dell tried to replicate the misfire. When he stopped to reload the thing for the third time, Scout said, “Hey so what’s your deal been lately anyway?”

The shells popped into the barrel with a satisfying click. “My deal,” Dell repeated, closing the gun.

“Yeah, your deal,” Scout said. “Damn, man, I mean you ain’t exactly been a friggin’ ray of Texas sunshine, not since we got here.”

“If this is about the thing with the teleporter again, that was on Soldier.”

A breath of disbelieving laughter left Scout’s lips. “Hey, you about made Soldier eat his own helmet cuz he tried to get the RED spy for ya, I mean this is _Soldier_ we’re talkin’ about, he’s a box’a rocks anyway, ain’t seen you so mad since our Spy sapped your sentry on accident that one time at Barnblitz an’ we lost.”

“He ought to know better than to mess with my machines,” said Dell, and he fired off another round into a half-decimated hay bale. “Both of ‘em. That teleporter needed to be workin’ and Soldier went and jammed his shovel inside it. And I don’t even want to know where he got the raccoon. Two and a half years that spy ain’t never disguised himself as a machine and Soldier goes and decides that’s what he’s done anyway.” Another thunder of shotgun shells. “Him standing at the exit waiting to bash people in the head with that damn shovel of his ain’t efficient spychecking, either. I got Pyro for that.”

“Oh yeah cuz he’s real reliable,” Scout snorted. “You been bitin’ his head off too even. In the lockers the other day? With the tie? I thought you was gonna strangle him with it, never figgered I’d see the day, you frickin’ baby the guy.”

“Lay off Pyro.”

The sneer in Scout’s voice cracked the cold air. “‘ _Lay off Pyro_ ’, sheesh, s’like you’re married to the freak. The hell’d he’d ever do for you even, seems like you get pissy with him more than you do nothin’ else no more.”

Outside, the wind began to howl.

Dell cracked open the weapon again, checked it, then shut it. “Ain’t a damn thing wrong with your gun,” he said, tossing it back to his teammate. “Try reloading it next time.”

“Hey—!”

“Goodnight, Scout.”

An empty field of white awaited him when he reached the barn door. He paused in the threshold and took a moment to damn the snow and whoever came up with the stuff. “Hey!” Scout repeated from behind him. Dell ignored him, which meant Scout kept going. “You don’t gotta take everything so personal, y’know. Shit, used to be wasn’t nothin’ ruffled you. The hell happened?”

Dell’s headache roared back into focus. “I said goodnight,” he answered, and disappeared into the cold.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. 2: Burnout

### 2\. burn·out  _|ˈbərnˌout|_
    
    
    1. the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion.  
    
    2. physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.

 

* * *

 

Dell awoke a full hour before he would have liked, his face too hot beneath a stray beam of sunlight. That made it about the same as every other day since he arrived. Coldfront’s base had the blessing of individual rooms instead of barracks, exactly nine of them, but his had a window that faced east and a bed against the west wall. Even though the first thing he’d done was fix a spare blanket up as a makeshift curtain, the damn sun still seemed to slip through to jar him awake before his alarm most mornings. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

By the time he dragged himself out from the covers his alarm was about to go off anyway. He pulled on his clothes, thanked heaven it was Saturday, and went to scavenge for food.

The mess was empty, but the fridge, unexpectedly, was filled with pancakes. Some of them were burned around the edges, and one looked more like a tire than a pancake, but it was all mostly edible. He stacked his plate with the least black specimens and high-tailed it out of there: the mess was the coldest part of the base.

He made his way to the common room and found Sniper with his feet kicked up on the card table, basking in a pool of winter-bright sunlight like a rangy cat. His hands moved in quick, neat fashion, and something soft and green spilled down from them to pool in his lap. Knitting, again. No one had realized Sniper could knit until they’d been hauled up here into the cold and the scarves and hats started piling up. He didn’t lift his eyes from his work when Dell walked in, but he did say, “G’mornin’, truckie.”

“Mornin’.” Dell settled into the vast stuffed armchair he had claimed as his own and started picking at his food. “Didn’t snow again, did it?”

Sniper chuckled and started a new row in his knitting. “Didn’t stop.”

“Don’t know how you stand it.” Even here Dell could feel the sharp prickling of his skin, irritated by the cool air, and he was wearing a sweater. “I’m hardly dealing with it myself, and it’s even hotter where you come from, ain’t it?”

“Hotter than Texas? Might be. In the bush, sure, in the wet season. Oh, mail for you,” Sniper said, leaning sideways in his chair to nab something out of the windowsill. “Yesterday’s,” he added when he stretched out an arm to hand Dell an envelope. “Y’seemed a bit out of sorts after dinner, though, thought it best not to bother you.”

The letter, a faint shade of robin’s-egg and stamped with BLU’s logo, was cold to the touch. “Thanks,” Dell said, wiping off his knife to open the seal. He knew what it was before he even unfolded it, but something possessed him to scan through the thin typewritten letters beneath the REGARDING YOUR FUNDING REQUEST headline again anyway. When he looked up he found Sniper eying him. “Well?”

“Denied,” Dell said, dropping the paper by his feet. “Same old. Don’t know how I’m s’posed to get anything working in this damn weather without the right tools.”

“What’s it you’re lookin’ to get fundin’ for, again? Seems you been gettin’ denied a lot, didn’t they shoot you down for a fourth-level sentry back in Steel, too?”

Dell nodded. “Yeah. The teleporters don’t work right in the snow, mainly. And I mean why should they, s’Aussie tech, don’t got a need for it to work in the snow down under.” Dell looked at his food and set it down, too. Suddenly he wasn’t hungry.

“Huh. Figure you’re right on that one. What’s the matter with ‘em? wasSeems they work fine to me.”

“Eh, technicalities. It’d bore ya.”

Sniper nodded, and let it go.

 

* * *

 

If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn’t say the teleporters needed fixing. More or less they worked fine. He had sorted out some time ago that the minor glitches the extreme cold caused in them—transmission lag, blips in frag detection, and the like—they were problems, but problems of a sort that could be solved in a few hours’ time with the right hardware. And the hardware wasn’t that hard to get ahold of, really. Hell, he could have it mailed up from his house if he wanted.

Maybe BLU knew he was lying about what he needed the resources for: fixing Pyro’s dispenser.

It was drawing on near late afternoon now. Dell had filled his time with re-reading the handful of magazines lying around the base and trying to sort out why Sniper’s truck had been stalling. Why he’d brought the whole camper all the way up here was anyone’s guess, and engineering was pretty far off from auto repair no matter what Sniper thought. But here Dell was, trying to fix it regardless. The truck was the only mode of transport they had off the base, anyway, and it didn’t sit well with Dell to have no escape routes at all.

The engine just revved and died when he turned it on. The second time it belched enough black smoke from the tailpipe to fog the garage for a moment. After an hour he’d gotten it to where it would rumble to life for a few seconds before quitting. By then his fingers were going blue, and the wind was sneaking in through the cracks in the garage door, biting into him.

He had just decided he wasn’t going to get anything more done on the thing that day when the door leading back into the base banged shut behind him. He looked, and found the Pyro standing on the cement steps. In one gloved hand she held a rusting round bird cage, filled with dead grass and defrosting hay. Dell shut the truck’s hood. “Where’d you get that?”

The Pyro just waved at him. She crossed the garage, to the old shelves covered in abandoned things, and started rummaging through the rusting coffee cans and plastic bins. Dell kept half an eye on her as he stowed his tools. He was just dropping the last of them into the toolbox when a muffled cry of triumph echoed from the shelves.

He looked up in time to see the Pyro sit down on the ground to push a tennis ball into the cage, on top of the “nest.” Humming to herself, she shut the little wire door, and when she noticed him watching she leapt up and ran toward him. He braced himself for another shattering hug, but she just skidded to a stop before him and held up her new toy, glowing with pride. “Lhuk!”

“I see it,” Dell said, not looking. He turned away to pack up his toolbox and hefted it over his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go inside. Too cold.”

She followed him back into the base and all the way back to his workshop.Dell unlocked his workshop door and flipped on the lights. Their familiar hum greeted him as the workshop was bathed in yellow.

He glanced over his shoulder at his teammate again. She was hanging back, trying to draw shapes in the fog on the windows with her finger. “Pyro, hey.” She ignored him. “Pyro!”

The Pyro looked up and tilted her head to one side. He met the empty gaze of her mask for as long as he could stand before pushing the weariness down and heading back into the workshop. The Pyro trotted in after him.

“Sit,” he told her, and she hopped onto one of the two-dozen crates stuffed in the corner of the workshop. Dell brushed past her to the workshop’s storage room, and after a moment’s rifling through it pulled out a squat, silver box, all bare wires and ragged metal. Gold and green vials of liquid sloshed in their tubes as he set it down next to the Pyro. She watched as he went to haul a dispenser from across the room and dropped it beside her, fiddling with the bars on her bird cage. When she reached for the glass tubes and their sparkling contents he slapped her hand away, and she whined. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he scolded, leaning over to the workshop’s smaller bench to pull out a sorry-looking cardboard box bursting with color. “An’ last time you got the stuff all over these, remember?”

The Pyro made a muted noise of delight when she saw the box, grabbing for it even before he put it down next to her. In her haste to pull out one of the dozen-some children’s books from the pile, she let the bird cage and its tennis ball egg slip from her lap. It clattered to the ground with a grating clang.

With the Pyro occupied Dell went through the motions of cracking open the dispenser to hook it up to the silver contraption. By now he didn’t have to think about it: disconnect the proximity sensor, ground the inductive ballast, check the monitoring graph. He had it put together in under two minutes. When he was done, the silver box lay on top of the dispenser, feeding a handful of hoses and pipes down into its guts. He thumbed the power button, and got the hell out of the way.

The dispenser hummed and something in it thumped. The familiar light of a medigun beam edged out of it to twine around the Pyro, glowing gold instead of blue. She didn’t seem to notice. They had done this too many times for her to stay interested.

From a safe distance from the dispenser’s reach, Dell watched, wondering what in hell he was putting in her system this time. Nothing he’d tried out of the dozens of vials secreted from Medic’s hoards had done anything like what he wanted them to do—Medic labeled things in a typical doctor’s scrawl, and in German. Some of them did nothing at all. Some had left him gritting his teeth and wondering why in hell the doctor even had it laying around. Over the years Dell had accidentally inflicted the Pyro with more pain than he cared to remember.

For a while he’d used Medic’s anesthetics (found by chance in a box clearly printed with NUMBING AGENT) in conjunction with whatever new thing he’d swiped. That had worked well enough, until one day he looked at her and realized he’d dosed her with something acid. It had eaten holes in her suit and skin and she still sat there quietly, unaware of what was happening to her.

Dell had come to prefer the shotgun.

If he was honest with himself, Dell wouldn’t say he still had hope of restoring the Pyro to the person he had found trying to set his house on fire. The arsonist with the firestorm temper, unexpectedly clever, with her one-eyed gas mask and her beautiful handcrafted flamethrower—that woman was dead.

But, he reasoned, if he quit trying, he’d be giving up. And damned if Dell Conagher would give up.

The Pyro, oblivious and happy, turned another page.

 

* * *

 

Dell left her like that, and went about his business. The Pyro would pour over those books endlessly, even if she couldn’t read them anymore. It was just as well, since from everything he’d learned about that first broken dispenser, it took hours for the mind-altering chemicals to go into effect. The Pyro had been exposed to the first one for something like eighteen hours altogether, as far as he could figure, and that was enough to turn a smart if unstable woman into a child.

On the other side of the workshop, the dispenser hummed. The Pyro talked quietly to herself in muffled words he was grateful he couldn’t understand. For a time he banged about the workbench, cleaning up after five-AM brainstorming sessions, kicking boxes of spare parts clear of his path. He found his shotgun on the ground of all places and paused, staring down at it. Trying to remember when he’d put it there. It never came, and eventually he just picked it up and put it on the higher of the two workbenches.

He had just cleared the second workbench of its mountains of refuse when he felt a tug on his shirt sleeve. “What?” he said.

“Strhy.” Dell glanced over his shoulder at her, found himself lens to lens with that rubber mask that served as a face. The Pyro let go of his sleeve and gestured to the book in her hand. “Hhlees?”

“No. G’wan, sit back down.”

“Munn’t hhna.”

Dell shut his eyes. “If I tell you a story, then you got to sit back down, okay? And a short one. I got things to be doing.”

She clapped her hands, once, then darted back to her seat on the crate. As Dell leaned back against the workbench, she stooped to grab the birdcage up from the floor. After a moment, she fished out the tennis ball from inside, pulled out a lighter from her ammo pouch, and began trying to set the bright green fuzz aflame. He didn’t bother stopping her.

Instead he folded his arms over his chest, looking heavenward, as if that would do him any good. “So … once upon a time there was this … cat, and the cat—”

“Nho!” Dell glanced at her, brows knitting. “Hh mrrd. Hh mrrd hnn.” _The bird one._

“I said I ain’t tellin’ you that one no more, I don’t like it.”

“Hh mrrd!” Her hands curled into fists and she raised them up by her face in a show of pleading. “Hhlees, hhlees, hh mrrd hnn, hh—”

He put up a hand. “Fine. Fine, just, don’t ask me again. Okay?” He got a vigorous nod in answer. The Pyro leaned forward, waiting.

Dell rubbed his nose and scratched his neck, stalling. Of all the idiot things he’d done since she’d gone and destroyed herself, the bird story was one of the worst. “So … once there was a bird. A phoenix bird, you remember what a phoenix is?” Head tilt. “C’mon, told you this a dozen times, girl. It’s this bird that can set itself on fire, more or less, but only when—only when it’s ready to die. Real unusual creature.” He glanced aside. “Now, this phoenix, she had herself a problem. She couldn’t turn her fire off.”

Outside, it had begun to snow again. Dell’s eyes cut to the broad flakes tumbling down to smother them. He must have been silent for longer than he realized, because suddenly the Pyro was making impatient noises, fidgeting. The tennis ball was crisped to black and the acrid smell of burnt rubber hung in the air. “Hnnd?”

“… couldn’t turn it off,” he repeated, shifting his weight from one leg to the next. “Or she didn’t want to. So wherever she flew she set big blazes. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Phoenixes, they love fire, same as you. But it weren’t no good, all the fires she was setting. They were outta control. She burned up the whole countryside, caused a real mess, hurt—hurt some people. Until all the other critters—the unicorns an’ the griffins, even the dragons—they rounded up and drove her out to the desert, where she could have all the fire she liked without hurtin’ nobody.

“But out there in the desert, she wasn’t happy. She burned and burned and burned everything, trying to be happy, till all the cactuses were black an’ there weren’t no living thing’d come near her. And finally one day she looked around and realized she’d burned up everything, everything except herself.” He took a deep breath, and the words came out bitter, as they always did. “So she did what every phoenix does. She went and burned so bright and so hot her own fire ate her up.”

The Pyro watched him with rapt attention, almost completely still. The dispenser’s hum seemed louder without her fussing, with the silence that consumed the world outside. When he paused he could hear the lights buzzing, the Pyro’s filtered breathing, but those were the only other sounds.

 

 

Dell exhaled. “And when she did, as the smoke went an’ carried her in the air, she found herself her family, since phoenixes, they get reborn when they die, that’s what the flames are for.” He looked up, and for a long moment matched the gaze of the empty black lenses. “An’ the phoenix, she got what she wanted, whatever it was. She was happy.”

The Pyro was quiet a time. She was turning the torched tennis ball over in her heavy gloves, squishing and warping the weakened plastic. “Whht hbt—” she started to say, when the ball cracked open in her hands with a pop. She stared down at it, startled. Dell glanced at it, too.

There was a tiny, pink-skinned thing, beaked and clawed, lying motionless in one half of the false egg.

He blinked, hard. Still there. He looked back at Pyro, and then again at the baby phoenix. It was gone.

His shoulders sagged. He glanced at the dispenser, still pumping its mystery chemicals into the Pyro’s brain and bloodstream, and made for the door.

 

* * *

 

“How many times must I tell you? Nothing. There is nothing to be done.”

The infirmary was spotless, though it smelled like blood and chloroform. Coldfront’s medical room reminded him of the premed wing at his second college, if you darkened all the lights and hung questionable posters on the walls. Medic seemed to have no end of questionable posters. This station’s theme of choice was mildewed advertisements from students seeking cadaver donations.

From where he was leaning against a steel table, empty of things that might jab him if he looked at them funny, Dell glared at Medic from beneath his goggles. His teammate ignored his stare. In fact, he looked _exceptionally_ bored as he flitted from surgical tool from deranged surgical tool. “It ain’t about Pyro,” Dell said, “it’s about me.”

Medic lifted one eyebrow, but his attention was still zeroed in on the delicate silver tools. “Ahh, have you changed your mind?”

“What?”

“About my new procedure,” Medic said, whirling suddenly enough that his coat flew out and dragged half of the tools to the floor. He didn’t even blink, too busy fixing Dell with a bright-eyed stare. “The one with the bugs, come now, I detailed this to you at great length!”

Oh, right. Dell recalled it now, a starless and chilly night at Hydro with Medic explaining—at great length, indeed—how integrating themselves with insectoid traits would vastly heighten their field advantage. The reasons behind it were flimsier than cardboard, and he wasn’t fooling anyone except maybe Soldier. It wasn’t like Medic actually cared if they won or lost any of their rounds. “No,” Dell said, “no, and hell no. The problem is I’m seeing things.”

“Oh,” Medic said. Everything about him, from his voice to his posture, dulled in an instant. “So it _is_ about Pyro.”

“It’s _about_ the dispenser that you poisoned, and I’d damn well appreciate it if you took some responsibility.”

“I was advancing the cause of psychological medicine.”

Dell stared at him for a long few seconds, felt his temper fraying strand by strand. “You know what, I don’t care what you thought you were doing. I am seeing things and this all rests on you. Fix it.”

“I can’t. I have said this!” Medic said, kneeling now to scoop up his instruments. “All the samples are gone, my notes were lost when the RED pyro burned Barnblitz, you destroyed the prototype in a fit of drunkenness.” He peered over his shoulder at Dell, squinting through his pince-nez. “So, no. I don’t even remember what I put in the original, and I have much more pressing matters to be attending to than minor hallucinations. And on the subject, Engineer—I would appreciate it if you would stop stealing my dispenser compounds.”

“Steal—?” Dell bit his tongue, leaning back. “…I ain’t done no such thing.”

Medic dumped the tools unceremoniously onto the table with a long-suffering sigh. “Lies do not suit you, my friend.” He didn’t even do Dell the dignity of looking at him as he said it, setting right back into organizing the scissors and scalpels. “Anyway everything you have taken has either been a disease or a poison. I do not believe this was your intent, poisoning Herr Pyro.”

“I don’t got a clue what you’re talkin’ about. You keep poison ‘round here?”

“Yes,” Medic said, absently picking a feather off of something long and silver and painful-looking. “Among other things. I’ve been wanting Spy to swap them into RED’s dispensers, but he’s being dreadfully stubborn about it. I think the last one you took was my tetrodotoxin.”

“And that is fancy German doctor for what?”

“Greek, actually,” said Medic. “Are you familiar with blowfish poisoning?”

 

* * *

 

Dell keyed in the security code and threw open the door to his workshop in time to see the Pyro staring quizzically at the ground. He barely registered the book splayed on the floor, or the stiff, arrhythmic way her fingers moved as she tried to reach for it. Instead he grabbed her by the shoulder-strap and jerked her away from the dispenser. She stumbled and hit the cement.

The dispenser made a flat, jarring crunch when he hit the power button. Even with it off Dell backed well out of its range, breathing hard. He hadn’t known he could make it from one side of the base to the other quite that fast.

A weak grunt drew his attention away. The Pyro was still laid out on the ground right by his feet, awkwardly gathering her hands and knees beneath her. He stepped away, watching as she tried to get up.

All her movements were slow and jerky, like a rusty wind-up toy. It reminded him of the night he had found her outside his house. She reached out a hand to steady herself against the workbench and came crashing down on her shoulder instead. For a few seconds she just lay there, twitching. When she started to move again, still disoriented and hunched up with pain, Dell took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

In college he’d had a friend majoring in marine biology, a chatty girl with freckles and curls. He’d got an earful on every kind of dangerous fish you could care to mention and promptly forgotten about all of them until just now. He didn’t remember much of what she’d said about blowfish, not until Medic began lecturing him on it. Then the memories started to trickle in.

_“… paralysis of the diaphragm, suffocating to death while fully conscious …”_

When he opened them again, the Pyro had managed to pull herself up to a sitting position. She was pawing frantically at her mask, fingers too stiff to grip right. Dell just watched, tired, as she dragged the thing off.

The mask dropped and the Pyro gasped in air, slumping back against the big workbench. He could see her chest heaving, the way her mouth hung open and her tongue lolled.

In short, a mess, same as always. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, a shoulder-length nest of grease and tangles. Sweat beaded her face and collected in the corners of the burn scar that streaked down one side of her face, and her eyes didn’t quite focus. They hadn’t in years. Now strings of saliva spilled out the edges of her mouth. Dell averted his eyes as she lurched sideways and vomited.

He cussed a blue streak all the way to his storage closet, louder and nastier when the Pyro started whimpering. He grabbed the first shotgun he saw and shoved the rounds in. On his way back to her he sent the picture book and forgotten bird cage spinning as he stormed past. The bird cage went rattling off beneath his second workbench, and the book thumped into the Pyro’s leg. She looked down at it, stupefied.

The safety clicked. The Pyro dragged her gaze upward and stopped on the barrel of the shotgun, pointed at her head. Then she looked up at him. Her pupils were mismatched pinpoints of black.

Dell stared back at her. His finger curled around the trigger. “C’mon,” he hissed, “quit lookin’ at me like that.” She blinked at his voice, face screwed up in pain, but didn’t look away. “Dammit, Pyro, close your damn eyes. It’s for your own good.”

“Okay,” she mumbled, and then her eyes fell shut. Dell wet his lips, felt the cool of the gun against his fingers. His hands were steady as he pushed the muzzle up against her forehead, right on the edge of her scar.

“Shouldn’t trust me like that, girl,” he said, and pulled the trigger.


	3. 3: Antisocial Behavior

### 3\. an·ti·so·cial be·hav·ior  _|ˌantēˈsō sh əl biˈhāvyər|_
    
    
    1. behavior that lacks consideration for others and may cause damage to the society, whether intentionally or through negligence.

 

* * *

 

Monday was every bit as cold and harrowing as the days before it. Dell leaned against the cold metal of his sentry, huddled in a thin coat with his face burrowed into one of Sniper’s gift scarves. The one Dell got had been a bright patch in this whole ordeal, anyway. It was a remarkable thing, his familiar Texas landscape worked out entirely in yarn. A cloudless blue sky unfurled over its length, mirrored with flat expanses of yellow grasses, with birds and little cow skulls and cacti breaking up the foreground. It was as comforting as it was warm.

Up on the cliff outside the RED base, Dell waited. For the last thirty minutes he had been sitting in his sentry nest, listening to the sounds of fighting inside the building. It wouldn’t have been a problem—sitting and waiting was a good chunk of his job every day—but for the damn cold. The frigid air burrowed in through his clothes and gloves and scarf, relentlessly chewing at him. Frostbite would probably kick in soon, with his luck.

Dell sighed fog into the air and checked his gun again: loaded, safety off. Just as it had been when he’d looked at it a minute ago. And the minute before that, and before that. What was that definition of insanity he’d heard passed around so many times, again …?

He had just shut the magazine when he saw motion down below. The Pyro—and Scout. Dell watched the two of them slink around the door on the far side of the base, circling around under the chain-link fence where the RED demoman had nearly done him in. From here he could just see blood splattering Scout’s clothes, and more on the Pyro’s suit. Her flamethrower was missing, and instead she dragged her axe through the trampled snow behind them, leaving a crimson trail.

They reached the other end of the base, the garage with the ramp. Must have been going to try and flank. Before they could get there, though, the RED heavy burst out through the side door, minigun in hand.

Even from this distance the roar of the minigun as it spun up made Dell flinch. Caught in the open, both his teammates froze for a split-second.  The heavy boomed an eager laugh and opened fire.

The RED was out of the sentry’s range. There was nothing Dell could do, and the thought of facing down their heavy just made him taste metal and cringe with phantom pain as the memory of having his own wrench stuffed down his throat came back. All he could do was watch.

The Pyro moved first, turning on her heel to run for cover. Quicker on his feet, Scout caught up with her in a stride and a half. He shoved past her to get away, hard enough to knock her to the ground. He didn’t look back to see her reaching for him.

In a few seconds more she was turning the snow around her red, her blue suit riddled with bullet holes. The heavy laughed in triumph, and set off past her body to where Scout had gone.

The bright trail the Pyro had dragged with her axe behind her made it look like she had crawled through the snow, bleeding. Dell didn’t watch the body long. The way she had fallen was eerily like the way she had two days ago, when he’d blown her brains out across his workbench. 

She’d dropped sideways then, hitting the cement with an unpleasant, wet smack. The buckshot had obliterated most of her skull, and blood poured out over the floor. The remains made an unpleasant squelch when he nudged them with his boot, as if she could somehow still be alive after that.

He had laid the shotgun down on the bench, wiping his hands off on his overalls even though they were clean. He removed the tetrodotoxin from the dispenser, and then sat there on the crates for twenty minutes, weighing the pros and cons of going back to Medic and jamming it down his gullet.

In the end he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. Instead he stowed the glass vial back in the storage closet, deep in a corner, too high and too far back to be anywhere anyone might see it. By then the Pyro’s body was gone, and with it all traces of what had happened, except for some buckshot embedded in the workbench and some blood on the floor. She came back ten minutes later, looking for her bird cage, and seemed confused when she found the tennis ball scorched and cracked in half.

“Mmd hht hhtchh?”

“Yeah, it hatched,” Dell told her from where he stood detaching the vial tester from the dispenser. He was elbow-deep in the thing, wrestling a screw that wouldn’t come off.

The Pyro looked around. “Mmrh hhs hht?”

“Flew away.”

“Hhut mmrh—”

Dell twisted the wrench too hard. The screw stripped, twisted in its socket but didn’t come out, and he scraped the heel of his hand bloody along the machinery inside. He dropped the wrench with an almighty curse—it _would_ strip the one time he hadn’t bothered with his gloves. “Dammit, Pyro, I don’t know. South for the winter. The Galapagos Islands. Okay? I don’t know. Damn it all.” Gingerly he extracted himself from the machine and examined his hand. A jagged flap of skin spilled down over his wrist, the muscle exposed and crimson. It wasn’t nice to look at, and it hurt like hell, but it was nothing one of his field dispensers couldn’t fix.

The Pyro was silent as he set up one of the field models. He’d gotten good at setting up his war machines one-handed after two years. Staving off REDs with his pistol while he pulled a sentry into position would do that. Before long the dispenser, a proper one, one he knew for fact did not contain any kind of poison, was humming over his wounded hand. Sometimes he wondered if he might not be better chopping the thing off.

His thoughts were interrupted by a muffled, “Srrhy.” He looked up to find the Pyro watching him from the middle of the workshop, near where he had put her down. She leaned back on her heels, hands laced together in front of her stomach with her head low and her spine slouched. “Srrhy, Hhenghy.”

The dispenser knit his skin together, easing the pain from his nervous system. Dell loosened his shoulders, leaning against the dispenser. He regarded her a second or two, sighed, and gestured her closer. “It’s okay. Nothing permanent.”

She didn’t move. Dell sucked on his lip, then looked down around at the floor. “Look, here,” he said, kneeling to pick up the fallen book he had kicked aside earlier. He extended it to her, an olive branch. “G’wan, go find Heavy or Demo, see if they’ll read you that. You’re fine. Okay?”

She hesitated only another moment, then trotted toward him to take the book. When she took it, she tucked it under her arm, and then took his uninjured hand in both of hers. She just held it for a few seconds, looking at him. Just looking. The pressure of her fingers hurt.

She let go, and left.

Dell blinked. The wind howled at him. The corpse in the snow was gone, leaving only the blood.

He grit his teeth and pushed his back up against the rock wall behind him. He checked his gun again. When a voice to his left said, “привет, Engineer!” he nearly jammed his fingers in the shotgun’s pump.

“Dammit, Heavy,” he breathed as their own heavy-weapons gunman climbed the snowy path up to his perch. “Told you that you got to stop sneakin’ up on me like that.”

A low rumble of laughter answered him. “Sorry,” Heavy said, “I am practicing to replace Spy. _Oui?_ ”

A smirk wrestled its way onto Dell’s face. “Stab ‘em with those bear claws of yours, right? They won’t ever see it coming.”

Heavy chuckled, setting his minigun down without more than a light crunch in the snow by the nest’s dispenser. “This—has ammo?”

“Yeah, got it all kitted out. Help yourself.”

Heavy nodded again, rifling through the dispenser’s drawers. Dell rubbed his hands together and wished his ears would warm up. “How’s it going out there?”

“Bloody,” Heavy said. “It is a good fight. Seven times I have killed little RED scout, once with bare hands, and still he charges Heavy like tiny bull.” He fixed Dell with a knowing look, a smile unfurling on his face. “And their engineer. He is joke, today he uses the baby sentries. I crush them, like this!” he said, illustrating with his massive hands. “Is a good fight, today. Doktor is building his über now, and soon we will destroy them and take the point.”

“Good,” said Dell, “Great. Maybe we can wrap this thing up in another few days and get outta this goddamn cold.”

It came out harsher than he intended, the bitterness amplified by the cold air—like it was freezing his words, preserving them in ice. Heavy was watching him. “Still this is too cold for you? This is a warm winter in Russia.”

“I ain’t from Russia,” Dell said. “You know what I’m used to, Texas is just as hot as New Mexico. Hotter, some days. I don’t got a clue how you’re dealin’ with this cold.”

“Fur. Good vodka.”

“Yeah?” Dell snorted, kicking snow off his boots. “I’ll have to try that.”

“I have question.”

“Shoot.”

“It is what you said to Pyro.”

Dell slowed. “Sorry?”

Heavy gestured toward the RED base. “Before weekend. Outside, here. I heard sentry, came to see where you had gone. Instead, I find Pyro and angry Engineer.” He gave pause, and Dell could feel his gaze upon him. Had he really raised his voice that much? “Is strange thing to say to your friend, that they are not a person.”

“S’pose so.” Dell turned his attention back to his sentry. “Don’t know if I’d call ‘em a friend anymore, really.”

“No? I have wondered why you are friends with him. He is strange.” Heavy dropped his voice, frowning. “I do not like him very much.”

“You ain’t tellin’ me you’re scared of Pyro?”

Dell was met with a long silence. Heavy brushed new snow from the top of the dispenser. “He is—something is wrong with him. He acts like little child, then on the battlefield he is like demon. Asks me to read him stories, like my smallest sister when she is baby, ehh …”

 “Demon—c’mon, Heavy, it’s just Pyro. They just—they got a different drum.” Heavy looked at him quizzically. “Like, like ‘beat of a different’—never mind. Point is Pyro ain’t a demon, they’re just … they like their job. You like your job, we all do, none of us would be here otherwise.”

Heavy’s face had taken a turn for the ponderous. He had opened his mouth again when a familiar figure crested the slope leading up to his nest. The Pyro gave them a little wave before slouching against the dispenser. Dell kept an eye on her as Heavy finished feeding the loop of bullets into his gun. “Well,” Heavy said, hefting his minigun up, “I am needed in fighting. Sorry for so many of questions, Engineer.”

Dell barely heard him. His attention was fixed on the Pyro, his eyes narrowed beneath his goggles. She looked at him, and then Heavy. In one smooth motion she slung the long neck of her flamethrower over her shoulder and gestured to the RED base, saying something Dell couldn’t make out under the mask.

As the wind whistled past his head, Dell leveled the shotgun with the Pyro’s face and pulled the trigger.

The gun’s report cracked like thunder. Dell cocked the gun again as her body crumpled to the ground. By the time it hit the snow, though, the blue asbestos fabric was gone, replaced with a red pinstripe suit. The RED spy lay dead.

Beside him he could feel Heavy’s surprised silence. “He don’t ever learn,” Dell said, leaning the gun up against the cliff face and taking out his wrench again.

“How did you know it was the spy?”

Dell could not suppress a humorless snort. How did he know? What was he supposed to say? That the real Pyro would never act that natural, not anymore? That the RED spy had never scrambled up on top of a sentry when Dell’s back was turned to pretend to drive it? That he could never get the unpredictable sway of her walk right? That Dell had the Pyro’s nervous habits and the cadence of her movements down by heart, as much as he wished he didn’t?

That it was better safe than sorry?

“Lucky guess,” Dell said.

Screaming and gunfire. The fighting spilled out of the RED base. Dell saw Medic tearing out first, missing his medpack and part of an arm. Behind him came Soldier and Demo, legging it toward mid. “Doktor!” shouted Heavy as the REDs came spilling out of their base. “Up here!”

While Soldier and Demoman bore left between the cliffs, Medic wheeled sideways, toward Heavy and Dell’s nest. When he passed Heavy on the slope, the gunman planted his feet, opening fire on the throng of REDs charging up the hill. Dell had just finished packing up his dispenser when Medic got to him. “What are you doing?!”

“Moving this,” Dell said, hefting the compacted dispenser in his arms. Beside them his sentry beeped and locked its sights on the RED pyro.

“I am _missing an arm_ , put it back—”

“Quitcher bitchin’, will ya?” Dell snapped, heading down the little path that lead back toward mid. “I’m gonna put it right back up.”

Medic followed him in a deathly silence until they reached the little cliff that dropped off into the middle territory. While Dell slid down easily enough, Medic stood clutching his stump and glaring. “Help me down.”

“You don’t need my help.”

Medic spat something in German. “Do not take your mistakes out on me! It is hardly my fault you took poison when you wanted panacea! Are you a professional or a child? Help me down.”

While Medic ranted, Dell got his dispenser settled and building itself in the little nook behind the cliff. Then he shot a glare up at Medic, stepped up onto the slowly-rising machine, and offered his hand. “Thank you,” Medic said, curt.

By the time the BLU team was pushed back to mid, Dell had a new sentry put together. The Medic was still hunched in a ball by the dispenser—his arm had grown right back, like a lizard. “Where’s your gear?” Dell asked him as he reloaded his gun. “We’re gonna need that medicine gun.”

“The spy stabbed it. Useless now. Next time I will booby-trap it for him.” Medic scowled and peered around the corner, where the BLU and RED scouts were shit-talking each other and feinting rushes. “I must get back to the base.”

“Don’t let me stop you”

“You are extraordinarily unhelpful today.”

Dell ignored him. He shoved more ammo into the sentry and set about pulling it into its second level. He’d nearly gotten it when Medic got to his feet and raised his good hand. “Pyro!”

Dell looked up in time to see the Pyro trot up to the nest, whole and uninjured. The pilot light on her flamethrower burned bright against the snow. “Hhy Hhenghy. Hhy Mmdhk.”

“Come, I have a job for you. I must get back to the base—”

“Be a lot more efficient to just shoot you, doc.”

Medic paused in his explanation, peering over his glasses at Dell. Dell pretended not to notice. “I hardly think respawn is what is called for here.”

“If you’re running off with Pyro back to base that leaves me with no Pyro to spycheck me, and in case you hadn’t noticed we’re kinda on the defensive now,” Dell said. His eyes never left the sentry. “Which means I got to be keeping an eye on every patch of empty air ‘round my machines, which means I waste time I could be using on upgrades. Now, if I just shot you,” he continued, “then you’d get back here round about the same time it’d take you to get here if you walked there and back, and I’d still have Pyro on hand. Real easy. Simple.”

Medic sighed. “Pragmatism! As always, yes. You are right, of course, but—I am declining anyway. I am certain you can fend for yourself. Pyro, come.”

The Pyro fell into step behind Medic without so much as a question. Both of them stopped mid-step at the sound of a cocking shotgun. “Pyro, get outta the way,” Dell said.

She did as she was told, wheeling around to look at him in obvious confusion. Medic did not turn. “Engineer,” he said after a moment. “I believe I have already told you my feelings on this matter.”

“You sure did.”

“If you feel this strongly on the subject, then keep Pyro. I will return to the base on my own.”

“It ain’t about Pyro.”

Around them, the wind began to wail.

“Well, then,” Medic said, and he sounded amused. He spread his arms out, his back a vast white target without the familiar medpack. “If this will settle your silly grudge. By all means.”

 

 

Dell glared down the sights of his shotgun at the doctor for what felt like a long time, the sounds of fighting fading from his ears. In the corner of his eye he could see the Pyro looking back and forth between them, like she wasn’t sure what was happening. Of course she wasn’t. 

“I am waiting,” Medic said. “If you are going to do it, do it.”

Dell curled his finger around the trigger.

“ _Doktor!_ ”

The bellow was distant and faint, torn by the wind, but that didn’t keep Dell from almost dropping the gun. His head whipped around and he saw Heavy in the distance, back pressed up against one of the half-rotted fences on the other side of the battleground. Flares and pipe-bombs flew around and past him, and he wasn’t looking toward them. “Doktor! I need you!”

Medic said, “Well?”

Something in Dell’s chest buckled. “Get outta here,” he said. “Get. Pyro, go with him.”

“Hhwht—”

“I said _get_!”

The Pyro got.

Dell stared after them long after they disappeared into the snow.


	4. 4: Delirium

### 4\. de·lir·i·um _|di ˈli(ə)rēəm|_
    
    
    1. an acutely disturbed state of mind characterized by anxiety, disorientation, hallucinations, delusions, and incoherent speech.  
    
    2. a state of violent excitement or emotion.

 

* * *

 

Run run run through the snow. When things weren’t fast but usually they were fast but when they weren’t fast the Pyro liked to go through the sno-cone piles slow and let her dragon bite into the cold. Shark would reach out its teeth and snap and breathe and puff and the snow would cascade down into diamonds around her boots and jump when she stomped.

But right now things were fast and Medic was faster than her anyway. If it was Heavy she might have been able to let Shark eat the snow but Medic wasn’t Heavy and Medic was fast. He led her through the snow quick as a jackrabbit and if she squinted and looked through the lenses right she could maybe see rabbit ears on his head. Medic said he had to go first because he was a Priority Target and the Pyro was just the Pyro and the redmask was around, so Medic needed his back protected. She didn’t really understand about Priority Targets, but Medic was usually right about these things.

The Pyro was thinking about before, back by the shouting where things were going really fast, except they weren’t around Engineer because usually things didn’t when they were around Engineer. Engineer did things slower and she liked that, she liked that he took his time and would make sure she understood what was happening. If Engineer needed her to be around his metal stuff and have Shark guard it from the redmask and the redbear and all the other redthings he would say Pyro, I need you to watch these, or Pyro, I need you to keep the sticky-bombs away, and she was good at those things even if she didn’t know why he called them sticky-bombs when they were gumdrops. She was very good at those things. Shark was just as good as the big bad wolf when it came to blowing things away or eating them up.

Run run run. At the fast place she had seen Heavy and Soldier playing with the redthings. She looked but she hadn’t seen the redmask and that was good because she didn’t like the redmask, all the other redthings were fun and fine but it was the redmask that really made her mad. She knew it was because he broke Engineer’s metal stuff, or she thought that was it, but there was some other reason there, too, underneath. She thought she should know why, maybe, but she never did.

That wasn’t what she had been thinking about, what had she been thinking about? Engie and his metal stuff and Medic. She had come back from home after she woke up again (she had been with her friends and things were real loud and she showed the redthings Shark and then she woke up), and Medic and Engie had been there in the cold. She didn’t like the cold, it made her suit stiff and went right through it, right through her clothes, biting at her skin like invisible snakes.

She had come back with Shark all by herself because the sun was in the middle of the sky and that was when everyone went and playedfought, except when they didn’t. She had found Engie and Medic and Medic wanted her to go with him back to the base, and that was why she was going with him now. Except Engie had said something and Medic had stopped and then Engie was pointing his gun at Medic and that didn’t make sense, she didn’t like that, Engie only pointed his gun at redthings. Not at teammates, not at Medic, not at the Pyro either.

Why are you doing that, she had wanted to say, but talking was sort of hard for her, it was hard to make her words get out of her mouth right and even when they did she kind of thought other people didn’t always hear them. Her face got in the way. Her rubber face, not the other one. But she couldn’t take it off to say things because it was her face, she didn’t like other people seeing her face. Not her rubber face, the other one. She didn’t even like Engineer seeing it but Engie was better than someone else because Engie was her friend.

Engie was Medic’s friend too because they were all friends (but Engineer was her good friend) and that’s why he put the gun down before the Pyro could say anything and she was really relieved. He must have thought Medic was redmask, sometimes redmask pretended he was Medic and he was _really_ good at pretending. The Pyro had tried pretending that hard and it hadn’t really worked, but she could almost always tell when one of her friends wasn’t one of her friends and was just redmask pretending. But Medic wasn’t redmask this time, she’d checked after, he was just Medic, and Engie had said Pyro get and they got.

Now her and Medic were almost back home because he needed another healgun because redmask stabbed his. They were almost there when Medic said something. “What?” the Pyro said.

“I mean, to be frank I don’t quite understand what his issue is.” He hadn’t heard her. He kept talking anyway, though, so that was okay. “I remember when you first joined us. You were an amateur! Jumping at everything. I bet you had never set foot on the battlefield in your life.”

“Huh?”

“It was embarrassing. Do you remember?” he asked and looked over his shoulder at her. She stared, tilting her head to one side. “No, you don’t. Just as well. Huh! Our friend Engineer should be thanking me for improving you. Don’t you agree?” 

The Pyro nodded even though she still wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Medic mostly didn’t want answers from anyone, she had learned that, and Medic was usually right about these things anyway. So she just nodded. Medic seemed pleased. “Now you are a truly excellent specimen of a firebug,” he said.

Firebug.

Firebug?

The word echoed around and around in her head and it didn’t quit even when she smacked into Medic’s back when he stopped in the hall on their way to the resupply place. Medic said something to someone as they passed back from the wakeup place and they were walking again and the Pyro didn’t really want to be with Medic anymore all of a sudden. She pulled up short, staring at her boots.

“Fi-yer-bug,” she said to herself, sounding out the syllables. Her stomach sort of hurt. She looked down at Shark and he just looked like a big hunk of metal instead of a dragon. That wasn’t right. Shark was a dragon even if his name was Shark, he wasn’t just an ugly collection of metal. She squinted at it and looked it over, trying to figure out where her friend had disappeared to.

By the time she decided Shark must have just gone to sleep, Medic had left her. The Pyro stood alone in the base. She looked around, and all the colors seemed a little less bright.

 

 


	5. 5: Agnosia

### 5\. ag·no·sia  _|agˈnōZH(ē)ə|_
    
    
    1. loss or diminution of the ability to recognize familiar objects or stimuli, usually as a result of brain damage.
    

 

* * *

 

The mess was a vast, dark room, always cold. It was full of echoes and cobwebs draped from the faraway ceiling. The lights were hung too high above the ground, bare dim bulbs, leaving shadows to creep all along the floor and counter tops even at high noon. The linoleum tiles were shades of dingy and dingier. The air smelled persistently of dish soap or mothballs, none of them could agree on which, and the cloying scent got into everything they ate. In truth, the BLU team only brought themselves to use the mess because there was nowhere else in the base for all nine of them to sit comfortably: a long oaken table with room for at least twelve stood in the middle of the whole affair, complete with creaking chairs.

They were all gathered there now, no one speaking, no one touching the food in front of them. Even the Pyro was still and quiet, staring down at her plate. Later she’d take it either to her room or Dell’s workshop to eat. Whatever was left of her still fought to keep her face a secret.

“Well,” Medic said, at last, “bright ideas, anyone?”

“Give up,” Demo mumbled. “All the way back to spawn, today, lads, that’s three points in an afternoon. _Three!_ ”

A soft murmur filled the stale air. From his seat, Dell watched his teammates. Through luck and plain stubbornness he’d managed to escape respawn today, and because of that kept their final control point theirs. His team had not been so fortunate. By the time the end-war siren blared he’d seen them all mill through respawn at least twice. If the Pyro hadn’t parked herself by his nest, spychecking and blasting away rockets and bombs, they would’ve lost the sentry and then the fight. She’d even put herself between it and the übered RED heavy, near the end. Got chewed up by the minigun and the sentry bullets in seconds, but it had been enough. They’d kept the final point, and tomorrow morning they would have a better chance at retaking their second.

Heavy’s distant-thunder voice broke the muttering. “We do not give up,” he said, settling in his chair. “We are not scared children. We are …” Dell noticed when Heavy’s eyes cut, just for an instant, toward him—no. Toward the Pyro. “… we are men. So. We find new strategy. Yes?”

He got a reluctant wave of agreement. Their morale was sapping away, Dell could feel it, like blood draining from a corpse. Even Soldier, icon of zeal that he was, didn’t seem to have much in him after today. He sat steadfastly shoveling potatoes into his mouth like Uncle Sam himself had told him to.

Dell sighed. “I think we’ve got to get a full offense going.”

“Offense, what, whaddya even talkin’ about,” Scout said, “offense, you don’t know nothin’ about offense.” He slouched on his elbows over the table, glaring at Dell from under his hat. “Camper. Offense he says, whaddya think I’m doin’ out there, I’m front-linin’ is what I’m doin’, day-in day-out, I _am_ the offense, do you know how many freakin’ times I got shot up today—”

“Your _voice_ is offensive,” Spy said, rubbing his temples. Scout fixed him with a glare that went ignored. “Do stop talking. Unless you have a better plan?” When Scout said nothing, Spy steepled his fingers and leaned his chin against them. “I thought not. Go on, Engineer.”

All eyes on the table cut to him. Dell glanced around at his teammates and shrugged. “Like I said. We’ve been playing it safe, and we’ll have to still tomorrow to keep hold of things, but once we get mid back I say we go all or nothing. They’ve got to be as tired as we are by now. Could be we just need one last good push.”

The team digested this. One by one they were following Soldier’s example, picking at their rations in silence. Finally Sniper spoke. “Sounds good t’me. I don’t have a better idea.”

“Aye, I’m for it.”

“S’what I was gonna tell you guys anyway.”

“Mmddhm.”

“Very well,” Spy said, picking up his fork. “An offense it is. But we will speak of this in the morning. I do not think any of us wishes to reflect further on today.”

A muted chorus of _no_ ’s answered him as they all slowly began eating. “We will beat those un-American rats back into their foxholes,” Soldier mumbled around his food. “With their tails between their legs.”

 

* * *

 

Never in his life had Dell had to use a space heater before this mission, but he was damn glad BLU had issued them all one upon deployment. After dinner he set out to the garage and plugged the heater into the wall nearest Sniper’s truck without too much fuss. He put it down a few feet from where he would be working, and wondered why the hell he hadn’t done that in the first place. His felt better just looking at the thing.

The camper didn’t do so much as cough when he turned the key. He kicked one of the tires, as if that would help, then popped the hood and took a look. Same mess of engine and metal. Dell sighed, opened his toolbox with the side of his foot, and went to work.

He lost track of time, the only measure of the minutes being his slowly fraying temper. He was not an auto mechanic. He had begun considering the pros and cons of just hitting the thing with his wrench until it worked when the truck’s camper door squeaked open. Dell leaned sideways over the hood, pulling up his goggles, and found— “Stretch?”

Sniper gave him a nod and a smile. Sniper had the most genuine smile of anyone Dell had ever met. It was unnerving, to tell the truth. It didn’t look like it belonged to him, as if he’d taken it as a trophy from one of the bounties he’d talk about sometimes. “Evenin’. Heard you bangin’ around out here. How’s it look?”

“Eh,” Dell said, wiping his hands off on his overalls and wondering how he’d missed seeing Sniper on his way here. There weren’t many ways to the garage, really. You had to go roundabout the mess and take a narrow, cold hallway with bad lights or a broader, colder hallway with no lights at all. “Don’t know myself, really. Told you I ain’t about cars.” Sniper chuckled, coming to lean against the cab by him. “Why’d you even bring the dang thing up here?”

“Privacy, mate.”

“Doors got locks.”

“Some of ‘em, sure, sometimes.” Sniper shrugged. “Ain’t convenient to be draggin’ me things all over creation, though, and they fit well enough in there. But nothin’ on the ol’ engine, huh?”

Dell shook his head and let the hood drop. “Afraid not. Be nice if there was an auto place ‘round here, but damned if we ain’t just straight in the middle of the woods. I guess there’s that town we got dropped in at, but it’d be a sight harder to get the truck down there while it’s broke. But I guess it won’t matter none if we get this round over and done with, BLU’ll fix ya up.”

“S’pose they will, yeah.” Sniper scratched his nose and Dell kicked the toolbox shut again, and they both just stared down at the obstinate car. “Oh, reminds me. Was hopin’ you could look at one of my guns. Actin’ funny.”

“Not your rifle?”

“Nah, those are all tip-top. The SMG.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Not quite sure. I’ll show ya,” Sniper said, and reached up to rub his arms. “Mind if we use that workshop of yours? There’s the firin’ range, too, but between you an’ me I’d rather stay warm.”

“Yeah, sure.”

 

* * *

 

The lights hummed. Dell ignored them, and nudged the workshop door open wider. Sniper gave him a nod and stepped inside, the SMG tucked under his arm. He set it down on the bigger of the two workbenches and glanced at Dell. “So what’s the matter with it?” Dell asked, dropping his goggles down over his eyes again.

“Wish I knew.” He slid it across the bench to Dell, who took it and started looking it over. “Been less accurate than usual, mostly. If it’s not a rifle, I don’t know much about it. Figured you’d be able to get it soon as look at it.”

Dell chuckled. “Nice to be appreciated. Y’know, Scout’s been saying that scattergun of his has been acting up, too.”

“That right?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t find a thing wrong with it, either, but he says it’s just been quitting on him. This thing been the only one giving you trouble?”

“Funny business, that. Yeah, just the one.” Sniper shifted his weight. “Reckon it must just be the cold.”

Dell snorted as he checked the gun’s safety and ensured it wasn’t loaded. “It’s always the cold. One thing after another, ice hangin’ off my nose and snow getting in my boots, every day. You never did tell me how you stand it.”

Sniper rolled his shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Been around enough, I’d guess. Too hot, too cold, after a while it just all gets to be one kind of uncomfortable.” He leaned an elbow against the workbench, looking at the gun. “You getting by with it alright?”

“Hell if I am. No, this is getting to be too much for me, much as I hate to say it. Mission’s too long, everything’s too cold—I got to put up with Scout and Medic and the dang Pyro …”

“Put up with ‘em?”

Dell chewed his lip as he checked the SMG over. He’d said too much. “Yeah. Don’t guess you’re around Pyro, much, huh.”

“Not so much,” Sniper said. “Enough to know they’re a bit of an odd duck, anyway. Thought the pair of you were friends, though, he’s always around you.”

How many times was he going to hear that this week? “Yeah, well. ‘Friends’ might be a little optimistic.” He ignored the quizzical look Sniper gave him, turning the gun over in his hands again. Couldn’t find anything wrong with it, either, same as Scout’s scattergun.

“Somethin’ happen?”

“Huh, what didn’t happen.” He sighed, slackened his shoulders. “Something happened, yeah. Don’t know that it’s my story to tell. Then again, it’s Pyro we’re talking about, good luck getting it out of them.”

None of the team had the slightest idea about what had gone on in their brief Teufort mission that summer, as far as he knew. Her self-destruction had happened too quickly for anyone but him to realize something had changed; at most, there had been some comments that she seemed to have just “settled in.” Medic was the only one with any inkling, and even he didn’t have the full story. Miss Pauling—the very woman who had extended BLU’s offer to the Pyro in the first place—Miss Pauling was the only one he had ever told, apart from Medic. She was the only other person who might understand.

Pauling had looked at him with a strange sort of expression, and then at the Pyro, who sat beside Dell with her hands curled in her lap, legs kicking. Dell had brought her along to BLU’s headquarters after that very first Teufort mission. She couldn’t be useful to the team like this, not in the long run. BLU had to do something.

“I’m sorry, Dell,” Pauling had said, reaching up to adjust her glasses. “All our records say she was even more effective than we had projected. It’s actually very impressive. I could show you the—”

“No,” he said, trying to ignore the way the Pyro was fidgeting like a bored child, tracing the scuff marks on the table in the private meeting room with a finger. “With all due respect, ma’am, I don’t give a damn about effectiveness. This is common damn human rights. You saw her before, you talked to her. She can’t even string a sentence together anymore. I know she’s got insurance if her contract looks anything like mine does. There ain’t a chance this is in BLU’s interest, putting a—an idiot on the team. And it was one of your employees that did it to her—”

“From what you’ve told me Medic had no intention of causing this.”

“I don’t care what his _intent_ was, he shouldn’t be getting away with lacing my machines with chemicals!”

Pauling sighed and looked at the Pyro again. For a long time she didn’t speak. When she did, to Dell every word sounded placating—patronizing. “I’ll do what I can about Medic. And her. If she turns into a liability, we’ll … arrange something. There isn’t much I can do if she doesn’t.” When Dell hissed his breath out and sat back in his chair, she reached up to rub her eyes beneath the glasses. “I am sorry, Dell. Really. She seemed like she had it hard enough already, the little I talked to her. She was more paranoid than Soldier. Did you have any idea she …?”

“I figured … I figured something was up. But her, she ain’t ever been stable, at least as long as I’ve known her. Stop that,” he said, tapping the Pyro’s hand when she reached out to take his helmet from where he’d set it on the table. “Last time I talked to her before I found her, she was lookin’ for Scout. And before that she’d, she’d been having, I don’t know. Fits. Seein’ things, is what I reckon. Found her under the kitchen table at three in the morning, once, scared as hell of something. That was real bad, that one.”

The Pyro was still looking at his hardhat. Dell paused when she tugged on his sleeve. “Hhi mnnha hwrr hht.”

“Fine, go ahead,” Dell said. He glanced at Pauling and found her watching the Pyro, eyebrows raised. A bizarre giggle drifted out of the filters as his teammate reached out and put the helmet on. Dell sighed. “I shoulda figured out what was up. She wasn’t right in the head, not after the dispenser.”

“She’s not your responsibility, Dell. It’s not your fault.”

“I know. I know that.”

“Are you sure?”

Dell said nothing. The Pyro pulled the hardhat down until it covered the lenses of her mask.

 

* * *

 

“Oi, truckie.”

Sniper’s voice snapped him back into the present. “Sorry,” Dell said, slow. “Just, it’s a long story.”

“S’alright,” Sniper said, shifting his weight. Dell could feel his eyes on him, even through the sunglasses he insisted on wearing all over the base. “Figure we’re all tired, yeah?”

“Almighty, yes. I was sick of this mission the day we got here.” Dell shook his head. “All of it. The snow, the dang team, Pyro … Pyro I wish’d just stop hanging on me every waking minute. Can’t get away from ‘em.”

“Yeah?”

“I ain’t a damn nanny,” he muttered. “I. I knew ‘em back before they joined BLU, I guess is what it is.” Dell’s eyes cut to Sniper the instant the words left his mouth, waiting for some kind of reaction. Sniper, though, did nothing, said nothing. He just watched Dell with interest, shifting his weight some. Dell swallowed. “Caught ‘em trying to light my house on fire, actually. They were … they weren’t the way they are now, then.”

“Now?”

“Crazy,” Dell spat, “At least, not this crazy. I think you’ve got to be a little, to get BLU’s attention—look at all of us—but not the way they are anymore. I watched ‘em build that flamethrower from trash, used my workshop for it. Knew all the pieces, how they all went. Real expert, deserved the title—you know, pyrotechnician.” He sighed. “Weird, but clever. Could actually carry on a conversation. Punched me, once.”

The words kept spilling out and Dell didn’t like it, not at all, but at the same time it was like feeling the weight slipping off his shoulders with every syllable. And if anyone would keep his mouth shut about it, it was Sniper. “Saved my life, too, if I’m telling the truth. Damn RED spy had the guts to sneak onto my property looking for something. Got the jump on me. Don’t know that I’d be here right now but Pyro came along with a rake.”

“A rake,” Sniper repeated, one eyebrow lifting. “Now that don’t sound too pleasant.”

“Hell, they went to town on the bastard. Didn’t go for the kill, though. When Pauling turned up, said BLU wanted to give ‘em a job, I wondered about that. I dunno. Maybe I didn’t know ‘em all that well after all.”

Sniper had grown attentive, much more so than he’d expected out of the man. He was watching him with a calculated intensity that made Dell uneasy, but by now he was in too deep to quit talking. “So what happened?”

“Turns out Medic, he’d went testing one of his idiot experiments on a dispenser of mine without doing me the courtesy of asking. Pyro—first job, that Teufort job when they got here, somethin’ … they got themselves hit with something more than what I’d call a safe dose off of it. I’ve been … last two years I been trying to undo it, but I’m down and I’m out. Even Medic don’t know what to do with ‘em.”

“You don’t say.”

Dell had opened his mouth to speak again when the door creaked open.

 

* * *

 

Engie’s door was open and that was good because it meant Engie was there which meant the Pyro could go in. She liked Engie’s workshops. There were places to sit that were more interesting than the rest of the base, and all her books were in there. It was awful when she wanted a book but Engineer was busy or grumpy, because the workshop door was always locked when he wasn’t there. Once she had asked him to keep it unlocked but he didn’t understand, he just looked at her for a long time and didn’t answer.

The door was open and she could hear the faint buzz Engie’s workshop made. It was kind of like breathing, like the workshop was alive. She liked that, that his workshop was alive. It was like being surrounded by a big purring animal when she was inside. The Pyro opened the door and stopped.

From the workbench, Engie and Sniper turned to look at her. What was Sniper doing here?  She frowned, staring at him. This wasn’t where Sniper belonged. He didn’t go here.

Neither of them said anything to her, so she just waved and slipped inside. It was dark outside and Engie hadn’t turned on all the lights so the buzz-lights were the only things to see by, and the Pyro didn’t like that, it was harder to see through the lenses. Everything was darker around the edges. It made her twitchy, jumpy, like things were going to come out of the darkness at her like they did in her dreams sometimes.

But today she didn’t want a book so she didn’t get a book, she just picked up her bird cage from where it was sitting on the floor by all the big wood boxes that always showed up when they were out somewhere not-Texas. There was supposed to be an egg in it because bird cages had nests and nests had eggs, where was the egg? She remembered finding one and even putting it in the nest.

She sat down on the ground and looked and there was half the egg, all burned up and oh, she’d forgotten. It wasn’t an egg anymore, it was an eggshell, because she’d lit it on fire and it had hatched and it had turned into a fire bird like Engineer’s story. That was what had happened. So there was half the eggshell, on the floor by Sniper’s foot. She looked up his long, long body, sometimes Engie called him Stretch and it made sense because he was stretched out like taffy, she looked up his back and arms and shoulders and he was looking back at her through his sunglasses. She didn’t stop looking at him. The Pyro always won staring contests, because no one ever knew if she was blinking or not.

And she did win. Sniper turned back to the workbench, but she kept watching him because what was Sniper _doing_ here? It wasn’t how things went. He’d never come to Engie’s before, not as far as the Pyro knew, and when Sniper’s pretty rifles were out of their houses and not on the field usually it was only on the kitchen tables. He got grease on things working there and sometimes he forgot to clean it up. Engie once said it was because Sniper grew up in a barn. The Pyro wasn’t sure what that meant but it sounded fun, she liked barns. Sometimes they would go to the place with the barns and the hay and at night she liked to roam around their side of the barn place, go up and down the creaky stairs and peer out the windows up at the black sky, huge and yawning and forever. Sometimes there would be stars and she liked stars, she liked the bright white against the huge dark. Once she had looked out and there had been colors instead of stars and that had made her feel kind of sick and weird, so she had left and hid until the feeling and the colors went away.

But they weren’t at the barn place, they were at the cold place, the coldest place the Pyro could ever remember being in and that was why Engie was grumpy all the time now. He didn’t like the cold. Sometimes the cold made him so mad he’d get mad at the Pyro, she’d learned that pretty quick. It was okay. She didn’t like the cold either.

Anyway Sniper was in Engie’s workshop and it was wrong. It was so wrong it made her grit her teeth, grind them together the way Demo said dragons did when they ate knights. ( _“An’ ‘e chewed up th’armor jus’ like it wasn’t nothin’ but paper, curled it all up ‘round the poor bastard’s bones an’ flesh ‘an all and—_ ** _crunch!_** _”_ ) It would be fun to be a dragon. Maybe a dragon had hatched from the egg. No, wait, that had been a fire bird. A phoenix.

No no no. She was thinking about something, she wasn’t thinking about dragons, sometimes it was hard to think about one thing for a long time. Scout was like that, always talking about different things, but he went so fast she couldn’t ever keep up anyway, and he never slowed down for her like Engie would, and—

Sniper was looking at her again. Engie was talking about something, low and too quiet for her to hear, and Sniper was trying to look like he wasn’t watching but he was, she could tell, she could tell. His neck was turned just enough, and the Pyro couldn’t make out where his eyes were looking, not really, but she was good at figuring things like that out, good at knowing when something wasn’t right. The back of her neck was getting all prickly-feeling.

She shook herself and hopped off the crate, letting the bird cage fall to its side with a metal clang against the cement floor. Now Engineer had turned to look at her, too, and that was fine, he was fine. He sort of leaned back when the Pyro wedged herself between the two of them, put herself between them, to get a look at what was on the workbench. Sniper stepped back entirely. “You need something?” Engie said.

The Pyro didn’t say anything because she didn’t have anything to say. She just looked at the gun on the workbench, Sniper’s weird long-nosed little thing. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t use the big loud gun like her and Engie and most of the rest of the team. It was a good gun, even if she was sort of bad at using it and liked her flare guns with their big bright muzzles and their comets more. In her opinion everyone should be using flare guns.

“Pyro?” Engie said, and she looked at Sniper. He looked back, looked at her different from she thought he usually did. Getting up and coming over here had only made the uneasy feeling worse.

“Look, maybe I’d best be goin’,” Sniper said. “We can have you give it a look again later, ain’t much good out here to start anyway.”

“All right,” Engineer said. “Sorry I wasn’t much help—”

The Pyro watched as they both lay hands on the gun at the same time, Sniper to take it, Engineer to give it back to him. Sniper reached it first.

The Pyro watched as their hands collided.

The Pyro watched as Engie’s hand went right through part of Sniper’s glove, like it wasn’t actually there.

 

* * *

 

 

Before Dell could so much as startle, before he could even see what had set her off, the Pyro lunged. Sniper crashed to the ground under her weight, knocking his head on the edge of one of the crates. As the Pyro snarled and howled through her mask, the RED spy’s disguise flickered out of existence.

With a yell Dell grabbed the SMG, and remembered it was empty. He settled for hurling it at the spy, who was kicking the yowling Pyro off. It glanced off his temple and Dell was rewarded with a grunt of pain.

He’d left the shotgun he’d used to kill the Pyro on the smaller workbench. Now he scrambled for it. Just as he wrapped his hands around it the Pyro screamed again in a terrible fury, an anger boiling out of her unlike anything he’d seen from her since—

The spy was on his feet again now, dodging the Pyro’s messy rushes and wild swipes. She had picked up the SMG and was brandishing it by the muzzle. The spy was focused on her, edging nearer to the corner with the crates and the dispenser.

He’d get one shot. Dell pointed the gun and fired.

The gun’s report boomed too-loud off the room’s walls, and blood splattered the floor. The Pyro stopped in her tracks, watching as the spy’s body slumped down over one of the crates behind him. She backed up a few steps, unfazed, and looked around. Dell put his back to the door, too: the spy feigned his death too often for either of them to be fooled.

It was deathly quiet. Only the wheeze of the Pyro’s mask and the hum of the lights broke the silence. Dell glanced at the body, pellet-ridden and getting blood on his floor, on the Pyro’s box of books. Nothing in the place moved.

After a full minute had passed and the Pyro began rummaging through the crates as if she might find him among them, Dell finally lowered the shotgun. “We get him?”

“Mmph.”

“Yeah, I dunno either. Hell.” He leaned back up against the wall and exhaled, watching her. After another minute or two she gave up, and looked over at the spy’s body instead. She prodded his shoulder. “Wonder what he wanted this time.” The Pyro glanced up at him, and he returned her gaze for a second or two. “Saved me again, I guess, didn’t you,” Dell continued. “Spook had me alone, too … hell, he coulda gutted me any old time till you came in.”

So why hadn’t he?

The question gnawed at him. He went over the last few minutes in his mind—realized, his stomach turning, that he’d given the spy the Pyro’s entire story. Great.

Dell exhaled, pushing his goggles down to hang around his neck. The adrenaline rushing through his veins was finally starting to die down, and he thought of the Pyro’s attack.

_The arsonist brought her weapon up, high over her head. It hung there for a moment as she stared down at him, suspended in the space between seconds. The spy stared back. Then the teeth of the rake scraped the ceiling as she slammed it on the spy’s back again._

“Hey,” he said suddenly, “hey, Pyro—you remember the garage?”

“Hhh?”

“My—take that thing off, wouldja?” She wavered, leaning sideways where she had dropped down to sit on one of the crates. “Open the filter, anyway. No, the filter. Yeah. You remember the spy.”

“Spy.”

“Not our Spy, this one.”

“Redmask?”

“Yeah,” Dell said, “redmask. Look, see.” Before he could stop himself he’d pushed off the door and lay the shotgun down on a storage shelf. He grabbed the body by its bloodied suit and rolled it over with a grunt—bastard was heavier than he looked. “Here,” he said, reaching into the jacket and finding what he was looking for immediately, “you gotta remember these at least, right? You threw a big damn fit over ‘em, here—”

He pulled out the RED spy’s cigarette tin out and popped it open. It was the BLU spy the Pyro had told him she’d met, who’d given her the cigarettes—the RED she’d only ever seen in his garage. But both the damn Frenchies liked the same sorts of high-end tobacco, and even if the brand was different … maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe he’d been going about this all wrong.

“Look here,” he said, pulling one of the tightly-rolled cylinders out from its home and holding it out to her. The Pyro looked at it, or seemed to. Then she looked at Dell, and he groaned. “I know you can’t see for nothin’ in here with that mask on, just take it off.”

It took her another long pause, but she finally reached up and pulled the mask off. Her ponytail, an ever-present snarl of black, caught on one of the tiny valves near the base and he had to wait as she unhooked it, and got around to fixing her unfocused eyes on him. “What?”

“Look at this. It’s a cigarette, you remember cigarettes?”

She nodded, now fidgeting with the frayed ends of her hair. “Spy’s. Spy eats those. Scout, too. Soldier.”

“It’s called smoking. You give ‘em lights all the time, come on, Pyro, _think_. You used to smoke, remember that?”

“I did?”

“Here, give—gimme your lighter. You got a lighter?”

Of course she had a lighter. It wasn’t the same Zippo he remembered her with, the one tarnished and engraved with a Bible verse that she guarded like a dog. He hadn’t even seen that one since Scout’s outburst when he asked if she was a woman. This was just a pink ten-cent BiC, one out of the two-dozen she always seemed to have at hand. And why not? She was the Pyro. She handed it to him and he lit the cigarette.

“Here,” he said, “watch, like this.” He took a slow drag and let the smoke drift out his mouth before offering it to her. “Try and do that.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

She took it, clumsy with her gloved hand, and gingerly put it in her mouth. It hung limply from her lips, and she gave him a bewildered look. “Between your fingers. Like I did. Now breathe in through it. Slowly.”

She did, and then she was coughing, spitting the cigarette out. Dell leaned back, putting his thumb and forefinger against his eyes. When he spoke next it was through grit teeth. “That wasn’t slow. Do it again.”

The Pyro wrinkled her nose and obeyed. Dell had begun to feel his hope rekindling when she got the hang of it quickly, despite complaining about the taste the whole time. “You remember doing any of this before?”

“No …”

“It’s probably why your voice is so rough, you know that? You used to smoke. Probably was all your fires, too, but time was I think you’d have near killed a man to get one of those.”

She took the cigarette out of her mouth and looked at it, running her tongue along her teeth as if to clear the taste away. “It’s gross.”

“Try it again. A little longer.”

“No, it’s _gross_ , I don’t wanna.”

“Pyro—”

“No!”

The lights buzzed incessantly. The cigarette burned, clogging the air. Dell listened to the beat of his own heart in his ears, the ragged breathing of the Pyro’s damaged lungs. Respawn never fixed that for her. Respawn never fixed a lot of things for her.

“Get out,” Dell said.

“Huh?”

“Get out!” He slammed the RED spy’s cigarette case to the cement floor with a bang so loud the Pyro flinched. “Get the hell outta my workshop, you idiotic goddamn—just get out. And don’t come back.”

“But—”

 _“I said_ _get out!”_

The Pyro cringed from him, eyes bright and wet. He didn’t realize he’d raised his hand as if to strike her until she had scrambled out of range. She grabbed her mask and got to her feet, still staring. Then she pulled the mask over her head, and ran for the door.

The door creaked open and shut again.

Then he was alone, with the droning lights and himself. Even the body of the spy had disappeared.


	6. 6: Photokeratitis

### 6\. pho·to·ker·a·ti·tis _|ˈfōtō-ˌker-ə-ˈtīt-əs|_
    
    
    1. a usually temporary loss of vision and inflammation of the conjunctiva and cornea, caused by exposure of the eyes to bright sunlight and ultraviolet rays reflected from snow or ice; see _snowblind_.

 

* * *

 

The one merciful thing about Coldfront was the locker room and respawn lacked most of their distinctive ozone-gunpowder-sweat smell, thanks to the cold. As Dell settled his hardhat on his head and wrapped his scarf around his neck the next morning, he didn’t need to contend with familiar reek distracting him from his newest goal: finding the RED spy.

He had to find the bastard, it was simple as that. Figure out what his angle was. Trouble was finding him if he didn’t want to be found, though—and if he did want to be found, that was trouble in itself.

It’d be easier with the Pyro, Dell reflected, and then grimaced. He hadn’t seen her at breakfast. In all honesty he’d figured she would have forgotten his outburst by morning. She always had before. Maybe he’d gone too far.

When he looked around the locker room, he didn’t see her. He looked again and spied her behind Heavy, sitting quietly on a bench and polishing the head of her axe with a spotted cloth that looked like it might have begun life as a shirt. Well. Let her be, he thought, as the sirens began to wail.

Twenty minutes later he had set up shop around the corner of the huge stony outcropping near the middle point: dispenser, teleporter, and a mini-sentry scanning the territory. They had taken their second point back quickly enough, and the fighting had moved off to mid in a diagonal, closer to RED than BLU.

His teammates came and went, swapping idle words as they zapped in through the teleporter or collapsed against his dispenser. Sniper—the real Sniper—spent a while just leaning up against the cliff in the dispenser’s range, propping his rifle up on a rocky protrusion and taking a few shots before uttering a low “Hmm,” and loping off toward the other end of the war zone.

When the Pyro first dragged herself up, clutching a gaping hole in the side of her suit and limping heavily, she went right past the nest. Dell watched in silence as she staggered past him, face fixed steadily toward the home base. Blood trailed her. Once she stumbled, and before Dell could make up his mind to help her she righted herself. She finally looked toward him, for a heartbeat. Then she returned to her slow, pained-looking trek toward base.

The second time she came up from the field again, after he’d respawned once himself and had to rebuild his nest further back. Now with one foot twisted in the wrong direction and missing the lower half of her left arm, she still didn’t go to his dispenser at once. Instead she stood some ten feet away from the nest, watching him carefully, and he acted like he didn’t know she was there. After a while she slunk up to the dispenser, dragging her flamethrower behind, and dropped next to it.

Dell watched her from the corner of his eye for a minute or two. He’d almost decided to talk to her when his thoughts were interrupted. “Move it, willya, hey, c’mon, quit hoggin’.”

He turned to find Scout, sporting a brilliant black eye and sans half his left ear, scrambling over the Pyro to perch on top of the dispenser. His teammate heaved a long sigh as the dispenser ebbed into him, and started reloading his scattergun. He looked ridiculous with his sweatshirt and his tossle cap, it made Dell colder just looking at him. Dell stepped away from his teleporter, turning his ice-cold wrench over in his hands. “News from the front, boy?”

“Yeah, their scout’s a shit-for-brains doorknob what couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if it held still.” Scout spat out a tooth as a new one began to grow in. “We’re doin’ okay. Heavy and Demo got ‘em pinned on fourth right now, an’ Sniper’s pickin off anyone tryin’ to sneak out. I dunno where _you’ve_ been,” he finished, peering down at the Pyro. She didn’t respond. “Ah, whatever, whatever. What’s the deal with the mini-sentry, hardhat?”

“Tryin’ new strategies,” Dell answered, and thwacked Scout on the side of the knee with his wrench. Scout yelped and jerked his leg away, nearly falling backwards off the dispenser.

“Lay off, shit, _ow_ , I ain’t a spy!”

“Got to be sure,” Dell murmured. “Anyway. Been trying to fix the mini, ain’t been quite right since I built the thing.”

Scout scooted back to the middle of his perch, rubbing his knee. “Oh yeah hey uhh, what was it, was it Goldrush? Goldrush it friggin’ exploded an’ lost us the round?”

Dell pocketed the frozen wrench, fighting off a shiver as the wind started to whistle. “It didn’t—yeah. Yeah, that’s the one.” He cast a glance at the half-size sentry. “I made it too delicate. Can’t put it together right half the time.”

“Then why the hell you usin’ it if it don’t work?”

“The big sentry isn’t winning us anything, is it?”

Scout had opened his mouth to answer when an ear-splitting roar boomed across the battlefield, coupled with the howls of men. His face split into a grin and with a whoop he was off, catapulting off the dispenser and bolting for the action.

The wind hissed through Dell’s clothes again, and he pulled his scarf tighter around his neck, tightened the front of his coat. The Pyro stayed exactly where she had slumped, her hands curled against her stomach. When he drew closer to her she didn’t move. Her axe was missing and her flare gun’s muzzle had been shattered, and though her flamethrower lay beside her its propane tank was completely gone. Scorch marks and soot streaked the weapon’s tubing and metal, and how she’d lost her arm suddenly became clear.

This close he could see the regrown limb, unprotected against the cold. The tips of three fingers were missing, still bloody, but the rest of her hand looked whole and uninjured, the red skin unbroken by wounds. She was using it to hold up the bottom of her mask, which he could see now had been halfway ripped off. Through the tear he could see her jawline.

 

 

 

 

“Hey, Smoky,” Dell said. All she did was look away. “Pyro, c’mon.”

Nothing. Dell chewed his lip, looking her over. “Look,” he started, and crouched down beside her. “I didn’t … I’m apologizing, okay? I lost my head yesterday. I’m sorry I yelled.”

Still nothing.

Dell sat there in the snow, watching her. With a sigh he tried again. “You’ve got to be cold in that getup. Didn’t I tell you that you need to be wearing more under that thing out here?”

She shrugged, a faint roll of the shoulders he almost missed. Dell pressed on. “Here, look. Take this,” he said, pulling off his scarf and holding it out to her. The Pyro moved her head enough to look at it, and then at him. “Put that on. Go on back to base, get yourself a spare mask. Okay?”

The sounds of fighting had begun to fade. The Pyro still just looked at the scarf Sniper had given him, unmoving, and Dell was suddenly very aware of his exposed back. He looked behind himself, and found the Heavy was coming toward them. 

The Pyro still hadn’t moved when he looked back at her. He put the scarf in her lap and turned to meet Heavy. As he got to his feet, his knees creaked and complained the whole way up. He stretched out his spine and groaned. “Mornin’, big guy.”

“Good morning, Инжeнер.”

“No Medic today?”

Heavy scowled. “Not now. Respawning now. You hear the explosion? RED demoman laid his trap—a good one.”

Dell glanced over where the fighting had been, where Scout had run off to. “How’s it holdin’?”

“Soldier and Scout, they are defending. I must go back quickly.” Heavy glanced around the nest and the frozen field around it. “I have not seen Pyro. Have you? Even изверг must help.”

“Izverg?” Dell said, glancing back down at the Pyro. “Pyro’s—”

The Pyro was gone, scarf and all. 

 

* * *

 

“Monster.”

“Come again?”

Spy gave Dell the briefest of glances, instead only shifting a tenth of a degree in the armchair he sat on. “Изверг? As a noun? Monster. Hell-hound, fiend. Has roots in the Russian word for ‘miscarriage,’ I believe.” His gaze dropped back down to his book.

Dell stared down at him, letting himself process the answer to his question. “Is that so. Well, then. Thanks.”

“Mm. Do ask Heavy to provide his own translations in the future, please. I’m hardly a dictionary.”

Today they had taken their own territory back, and nearly pushed RED out of mid, but before they could properly sort out their last rush the end-war whistles had blown, and it was dark out. Back to another stalemate. Now, after dinner, most of them had taken to the common room. It remained the most pleasant place in Coldfront when night drew on, a bit cramped but boasting a fireplace and warm lights. Behind him Dell could hear Scout and Soldier trying to out-talk one another, with Demo interjecting whenever there was a lull to stir them up again. The rest were out in the kitchen, last he knew, save the Pyro. He hadn’t seen her since she’d taken his scarf.

Monster.

His teammates’ racket gnawed at him. Dell left for his room, though not before detouring to double-check that the door to his workshop was locked. When he turned the last corner he half-expected to find the Pyro, sitting and waiting for him like she often did, but she was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t shake the memory of her trudging past him and his dispenser, bleeding, as he tried the handle.

It was locked, as it was supposed to be, but he slid open the cover on the security pad to check the inside anyway. As he punched in the numbers it occurred to him that he hadn’t told anyone of the RED spy’s infiltration, and moreover, he didn’t feel especially disposed to do so. But security breaches were as much his responsibility as anyone else’s, Dell reasoned as he opened the door. His attitude was just the cold and the long mission getting to him. He’d let everyone know in the morning.

The electric lock beeped and turned green, but before he could reach for the handle again, footsteps drew his attention. He looked up in time to see the Pyro round the corner. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him.

“Hey,” Dell said after a second or two. The Pyro took a step back, drawing her shoulders up and lifting her hands in a show of appeasement. “Oh, now come on, I said I weren’t mad at you no more.”

“Yhhu hrmnt?”

“Apologized and everything. What, you get killed on your way back to base?”

She shook her head. “Hhi mmndt hye hhdy.”

“You what now?”

Slowly, like any sudden movement might make Dell snap at her again, she reached up and popped the filter on her mask. “I didn’t, didn’t die today. You’re really not mad?”

Dell shook his head, opening the door to his workshop. Cold air rushed out to meet him. “No, I’m not mad. What’d you do with my scarf?”

“What?”

“My scarf, Pyro, the one I gave to you today.” He snapped on the lights and stepped back from the chill, leaning against the doorway to face her.

She folded her arms across her ribs, both hands curling into the suit. Dell waited as she rocked back once on her heels. “I don’t have that.”

“You didn’t lose it, didja?”

“I don’t have it, I didn’t have it. I didn’t,” and she paused mid-sentence to take a deep breath. Her next words came out all in a rush. “I didn’t come see you with your machines today because you were mad at me and you told me to go away so I didn’t, just, I saw you once when I had to go home but I pretended like I didn’t. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

The words poured over Dell and he stared at her, not understanding. Slowly, her meaning began to put itself together. “You didn’t come by my dispenser today.”

“No because—”

“I know why,” he said. “So you were never there. You were never there at all, dammit, damn it, I am a—a blind old fool—”

He twisted on his heel and stepped into the workshop, ignoring the Pyro when she called him. A few seconds later she was peeking into the workshop, but not coming inside. “Engie?”

Dell didn’t hear her. He stood fixed in place, eyes locked on the neatly-folded, blue-and-gold scarf that lay upon his workbench, and the crisp lines of the note set atop it.


	7. 7: Feral

### 7\. fe·ral _|fi(ə)rəl,ˈferəl|_
    
    
    1. in a wild state, esp. after escape from captivity or domestication.  
    
    2. of or characteristic of wild animals; ferocious; brutal.

 

* * *

 

If there was anything Dell was not, it was stupid. No one, except perhaps Scout, ever found it in them to imply that Dell’s intelligence was anything less than stellar. It was a point he prided himself on, his broad understanding of things, and it had saved his life both on and off the field more than once.

Thing was, no one ever said “intelligent” and “wise” were anywhere near to the same. There was a saying about that, wasn’t there? It was something Dell’s grandmother used to murmur to herself, long, long ago, when his dad and his dad’s dad would start to get up to something.

He was having trouble recalling it now, sitting frozen stiff with his back to the crumbling wall of the abandoned house that constituted the middle point, but he was sure it would have applied to the situation. Next to him sat the Pyro with Dell’s scarf coiled around her neck, shivering.

Just two days ago Dell had been tearing his workshop apart, looking for any possible way the RED spy could have slunk in behind his back. None of the windows opened, there was only one door, and he was the only one with the combination. The Pyro had stood in the doorway and watched him, a bundle of nerves if he’d ever seen one. But apart from a minute piece of cigarette ash on the floor, which could have easily come from his ill-fated experiment with the Pyro, he had found nothing.

Dell glanced down at the note in his hand, the one he had found carefully pinned to his returned scarf. Upon it was elegant handwriting in black ink, instructing him in no uncertain terms to meet the RED spy come Saturday evening at mid—BLU’s territory, for now. “Oh,” it finished, “and bring your pet hellion, if you can manage to find a leash. Our talk concerns her.”

Her.

Somewhere an owl was calling in long, arrhythmic hoots. The wind disguised any crunch the snow might have betrayed, and the middle point lacked much in the way of cover should he and the Pyro need it.

Now he remembered. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” he said to himself, breath casting itself white on the air.

“Hhengy?” the Pyro said.

“Yeah?” Dell glanced over at her. Before now she had been content to sit and fire flare after flare into the frozen fireplace against one wall, but now she was watching him, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest.

“Hhddr hwe huing?”

A derisive snort of laughter pushed its way up out of Dell’s ribs, and he shifted his weight to adjust how his pistol sat against his leg. “You know what, I honestly got no idea this time.”

“Ahem,” said a voice, above the wind.

Dell jerked up to his feet, grabbing the gun. Next to him the Pyro followed, and Dell could hear her snarling under the mask. When he looked at her she was hunched, her hands raised and fingers splayed like claws. A vicious noise sputtered out of the filters and she lurched forward.

He barely managed to catch her arm in time. She jerked ahead anyway, dragging him two steps before he hauled back with all his weight. Dell locked their arms at the elbow and yelled. “Pyro, dammit, shut up!”

  

 

 

Finally she stopped, turning to look at him. The snarls faded. “Hhut—”

“Stay here,” he said, pulling her back. “Stay here and don’t doanything unless I say so, got it? Lord, Smoky.”

She said nothing more. Dell exhaled, gathered his temper, and looked back to the spy.

The spy stood a respectful twenty feet away, alone and prim as ever, dressed in a crimson peacoat. He had come up out of the snow like a ghost. When Dell pointed the pistol at him, he lifted both eyebrows and then raised his arms and spread his hands: no weapons. “Sleeves up,” Dell called.

He got a sigh. “Very well,” the spy said, and peeled back the sleeves of his coat and suit. Nothing. When Dell did not lower the gun, the RED pulled them down again in a smooth gesture. “I could have killed you off the field one-hundred and fifty-seven times over in the last month, _monsieur_ , and I have not laid a hand on you. Give me the benefit of the doubt.”

“You? That’s hilarious.”

“Perhaps, but you have brought two weapons—” His eyes cut to the Pyro. “—and I, none. Put the gun down, Conagher, I am unarmed.”

Dell glared at him. Next to him the Pyro still bristled, wound so tight he thought she might be shaking with it. But in the end he popped the safety back on and shoved the gun into his pocket. “Pyro, sit down.”

“Hhut Hhengy—!”

“Sit.”

She looked from the spy to him. Finally she let it drop, and sank back to sit on the ground with a plaintive whine.

“So,” Dell said, “what the hell does a sorry bastard like you think he’s doing arranging a meeting with me?”

The spy gave him a bored look. It was the same look he’d given Dell in the secret room beneath his garage, just before he had lopped off Dell’s thumb. “Try to have an open mind, my friend. I come bearing a proposal.” When Dell said nothing, the spy closed the gap between them and paused to double-check the Pyro. “I was being serious about the leash, you know.”

“She ain’t an animal.”

“Are you certain?” said the spy. Dell grit his teeth. “But ah, yes, _she_! The mysterious BLU Pyro is a woman! I don’t know how it slipped my notice, honestly. I never suspected, not even in your dreadful garage. Not exactly feminine, is she? But I suppose madness knows no gender.”

“Get on with it.”

“I’m coming to it,” the spy said, pulling a familiar silver case out from within his coat. As the spy picked and lit his cigarette, his eyes wandered to her again. She sat with her arms crossed, elbows leaning against her knees and mask downcast—sulking. “It explains a great deal, though,” the spy went on. “I had often wondered what about your pyro I was getting so wrong that you always knew it was me. Never would I have thought I were not acting mad _enough_.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dell said. “If you’re just going to stand there an’ tell me things I already know then we’re leaving.”

“What would you say if I were to offer you a way to restore her mind?”

Dell stopped. Everything stopped, except the snow that fell in lazy spirals past the broken windows. The wind had died. The owl had gone silent. The whole world held its breath.

“Can’t be done,” Dell said.

“Is that so?” said the spy. “Or is that simply what you have decided to believe?”

 

* * *

 

Dell picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of his coat and tried to make sense of the idiot he’d turned into. “So,” he said, “start talking.”

The RED spy gave a contemplative _hmm_ from where he stood leaning against the frozen and shattered timber of the old house. Around them the wind had quieted, and the Pyro sat a little ways off, by the fireplace still, a hunched-over wretch. Dell waited, his mouth a hard line. The spy sighed, rolling his eyes. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“I am sure you must have questions,” the spy said, lifting an eyebrow. “Interrogate me. This cold is torture enough for it.”

Everything about this felt wrong. The seconds moved by, tireless as ever. The spy was watching him with a bored expression. Dell shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets and said, slowly, “So you’re telling me you can fix Pyro.”

“Correct.”

“Even if I believed that—and I don’t—why would you come waltzin’ in outta the blue and hand it to me?”

“Can one not simply alleviate his fellow human’s suffering?”

“Not you.”

The spy chuckled. “You are a sagacious man. I expect no less. But no, Engineer, this I truly do offer as a free boon. Call it a token of good will from a certain benefactor.”

“Benefactor.”

“A benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous, at present. He finds himself in need of your particular skill set, specialized as it is.”

“He does, does he.” Dell cut a glance over at the Pyro. “What’s wrong with your engineer?”

“The request was for you specifically.” The spy spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “You are a valuable asset to any effort. I am sure you already know this.”

Would that he did, Dell thought. Damn team sure didn’t act like it half the time.  “And why ain’t he speakin’ to me directly?”

“Circumstances are not currently ideal.”

“Ideal,” Dell said. The spy, fingers now steepled, said nothing in answer. “Right. Sure. So say I buy that, say I buy your whole story. How exactly you plan on fixing her?”

 “Do you know the primary difference between yourself and my own team’s engineer?” said the spy.

The question caught Dell by surprise. “Well, my buildings ain’t put together like tinkertoys, for one.”

“Mm. There is also the fact that our engineer does not become an irrational child when made to deal with our medic.” Dell lifted his eyes in time to see the spy smirk. “He is simply unpleasant to everyone equally. You do yourself a disservice, you know, holding on to such grudges.”

“I ain’t seein’ what this has got to do with anything.”

“It has a great deal to do with several things, actually. As I said, you do yourself a disservice, not befriending your medic. On the other hand, my own team’s medic and engineer—why, they get along quite well, or as well as anyone can get along with our engineer. Together they are quite the formidable duo.” He glanced aside, and then back, and leaned forward by degrees. “They have created a means that will return reasoning to your fiery friend.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, but I do.” The smirk the spy gave him was unbearable. “Because they used it on me.”

“What?” Dell couldn’t keep a straight face, his eyes narrowing, caught in confusion. “That ain’t—why?”

“Your dispenser was most fortunately left alone after your pyro dragged you upstairs, when I first met her. You remember that, I trust.” Dell stared at him. “She did more damage than I would strictly like to admit. And your trick with the pistol had me very close to the edge.”

“Pity it didn’t do the job.”

The spy blinked at him, slowly, patient. “If I may continue.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“It was a lucky thing, that the dispenser was there. More so that you’d not yet keyed it to specific genetic signatures. But once I was done with it and had made my escape, I found I began to experience very … shall we say peculiar things. I’m sure you know what I mean. I had a very disquieting week where I was convinced our soldier had the head of an eagle, among other visions. So, of course, I told our medic of my problems. I will say it took the intervention of our engineer to keep him from simply testing me endlessly for different reactions. But I am a valuable asset as well. RED tripped over its own feet to assure my recovery.”

Every new word that fell from the spy’s mouth made the slowly-growing ringing in Dell’s ears a little louder, a little more piercing. By the last sentence it turned into a siren. “RED funded ‘em for that?” he said, and even he heard the treacherous calm in his voice.

The spy must have caught it too. He didn’t answer for a moment, instead directing his gaze out the remnants of a broken window. “They did.” His eyes cut back to Dell after he said it, as if gauging his reaction. Dell hardly noticed.

Two years of appeals to BLU.

“So,” he ground out, “it worked?”

“I am blessedly free of visions, yes.”

“But you weren’t— _insane._ Pyro, she’s crazier than a—she’s got more than just a couple loose screws, she don’t remember nothin’, she’s not the same person. I don’t even know if she still is a person.”

“She is a delicate case, isn’t she?” the spy said. “‘Not an animal,’ ‘not a person.’ What does that make her, Mr. Conagher?”

_Monster._


	8. 8: Cognitive Dissonance

### 8\. cog·ni·tive dis·so·nance _|ˈkägnətiv ˈdisənəns|_
    
    
    1. the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, esp. as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

 

* * *

 

This was bad. It was bad, bad, bad, it was worse than anything else ever, it was so bad that the Pyro wanted to get up and drag Engineer back home. But Engineer had told her sit, stay there, he had to talk to redmask. She didn’t understand. Redmask was bad, and Engineer shouldn’t be talking to him.

It was cold, and the sun was going away. All the colors were starting to drain, to leech out into the ground where the snow swallowed them up. From where she sat, Engie and redmask were two dark shadows leaning up against the other side of the broken house. What had the house looked like when it wasn’t broken? Who had lived there? Maybe pigs? Pigs like that story Soldier had told her once a long time ago. She didn’t remember how it ended, but they had been very pay-tree-otick, Soldier said, and there had been a red wolf with a hammer—

—the Pyro shook her head, hard, no, no no no she was trying to think about—Engineer. He was talking to redmask and it was _bad_.

Why it was bad exactly she couldn’t seem to pinpoint. Redmask destroyed Engie’s machines and pretended really good and made her friends die, and she didn’t like any of that. But all the other redthings did that and if redrabbit or redbear or one of the other redthings had been the one talking to Engineer things wouldn’t be this bad, probably. She thought maybe redmask had once done something extra bad, but she couldn’t remember it.

Anyway she just didn’t _like_ redmask. She didn’t like them talking, and she didn’t like that she only had her flare gun in case she needed to fight redmask, she couldn’t keep Engie safe with just a flare gun. Maybe if she yelled loud enough Shark would come eat redmask up.

She was about to try it when Engie made a great big sigh. “Of course, I do not expect an answer immediately,” redmask said. “I understand your misgivings. We are contractual enemies.”

“Sight more than that.”

Redmask chuckled, shrugging. “I believe you _and_ Pyro have more than paid me back for the incident with the immortality machine. Or have you forgotten Dustbowl—?”

“I haven’t forgot nothin’,” Engie snapped. Redmask held his hands up in front of himself, then let them drop when Engineer kept going. “I sure as heck haven’t forgot you’re a two-faced rat who’d say anything but anything to get what he’s after.”

“My, my, do give me some credit. I am but acting on the behalf of another, after all. I have no personal quarrel with you.”

“You’re askin’ that I let you screw around with her brain more than’s already been done. For all I know you’ll turn her into a vegetable.”

“I assure you—”

“Oh, _you_ assure me, do ya?” Engineer jabbed a finger at him, so sharp and fast the Pyro flinched as if he’d directed it at her. “ _You_? You and your miracle cure, no catch—you think I was born yesterday?”

Redmask waited, listening, and the Pyro marveled at his calm in the face of Engie’s rage. What were they talking about? And now Engineer was going again. “I got—I’ve got enough on my conscience. Give me one godforsaken reason I should believe a word out of your lying mouth.”

“Because,” redmask said, “you are wholly and entirely out of options. You have tried and you have failed.”

“Don’t—now listen here, you don’t know a thing about—”

“Is she better off with your methods? The poisons? The shotgun?—oh, don’t look so shocked. I have been observing you since our arrival. These are not medical trials, these are the gestures of someone trying to convince himself he is still at work. You have given up on her, Conagher. You are no longer working to help her; you are going through the motions so that you do not have to accept that you have failed.”

Whatever redmask had said it made Engie stop talking—made him go really quiet and still. Redmask kept going, quieter, and she kind of thought he was looking at her. “It makes very little difference to me, in the end, what you choose to do. But it is plain to anyone with eyes that she has placed her trust in you. Try to remember that.”

The snow kept falling down, down, down. Engineer didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t look all wound up and stiff the way he got when he was mad about something. Instead he looked kind of slumped and washed out. The coming night was sucking the color out of him, too.

“Well,” redmask said, “I shall take my leave. Consider my offer. I will be in touch.” Then he turned, and walked away into the snow and the black night. Engineer watched him, and the Pyro watched Engineer. After a while, after redmask had disappeared, Engineer turned back around and started toward her.

The Pyro jumped to her feet, jittery, nervous, she was _so glad_ redmask was gone and everything was okay and normal and fine.

 

* * *

 

Together they walked back home, slower than the Pyro wanted, she wanted to be out of the cold. Shark kept her warmer out here than anything else, and she didn’t have Shark now, she just had her flare gun and that wasn’t any good for being warm. Instead she just stuck close to Engie, stepping in all of the footprints he left behind. His feet were bigger even if his legs were shorter.

Engie didn’t say anything the whole way back. The Pyro still wasn’t sure if he really wasn’t mad at her still, he’d gotten plenty mad when he found his scarf on his workbench and she hadn’t been able to figure out if that was her fault or not. But he wasn’t yelling at her, he hadn’t since she couldn’t do the thing with the cigarette right. Maybe she could take one of Scout’s cigarettes and practice and do it right for him, even if it did taste gross. Maybe that would cheer him up.

The wind had started really howling by the time they reached home, screaming like an angry animal. It whistled in through the mesh on the Pyro’s mask and stung her face. She lifted her hands to pull Engie’s scarf over it, but it was stuck on her collar. With a hard jerk she dislodged it, and in the same moment an even stronger gust of wind crashed into them. It tore the scarf from her hands and then it was flying away, pulled like a helpless kite.

The Pyro cried out, stumbling a few steps in the snow after it, but it was gone in moments.  She looked at Engineer, worried, and found him staring after it too. It was already far out of reach, tumbling half in the air and half on the ground, quickly disappearing. Then he glanced at her, and turned back to the door. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But—”

“It’s okay.”

Engie opened the door and went inside. She followed, and when he pulled the door shut behind them and sank back to lean against it she watched him, feeling bad. She’d lost his scarf. He’d let her use his scarf and she lost it and that really was her fault and now he might get mad again and she would deserve it. The Pyro hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t say anything back. Maybe he hadn’t heard her. She looked around, and since it was just her and Engie and Sniper’s big truck she pulled off her mask and said it again, just to make sure, she had to make sure. “I’m sorry.”

Engineer looked up at her, finally, and reached up to push his goggles down around his neck. His gaze went from her face to her mask, clutched between her fingers. With a great big sigh he rubbed at his eyes and the reddened, wind bitten skin around them. “I haven’t been doing you any favors for a long time now, have I?” The Pyro didn’t know what she was supposed to say to that. “Shit. Gettin’ told off by that rat, even.”

“Um—why were you talking to redmask?”

“He had to … tell me some things I didn’t want to hear. That’s all.”


	9. 9: Aboulomania

### 9\. abou·lo·ma·nia _|eɪˌbuːloʊˈmeɪniə|_
    
    
    1. paralysis of the will; pathological indecisiveness.

 

* * *

 

When Demo made a joke about the battlefield’s temperature dropping to absolute zero, no one laughed. It hit too close to home.

Territory had not stayed in either team’s hands for more than an hour for a week. Every morning the BLU team would kit up and drag themselves out to mid, scrimming endlessly with their RED counterparts until the sirens rang. Even with the change to their offensive tactics, no ground was made. It seemed the RED team had come to the same conclusion at the same time they had. The fights were quicker and bloodier, but nothing else changed.

Time crawled, and Dell couldn’t get the RED spy’s words out of his head. He packed up the experimental dispenser he had been using on the Pyro and quit keeping track of Medic to get a feel for when he could break into the infirmary. Several times on the field he had to steer the Pyro back toward the fighting, away from the surrounding woods—she was torn up over losing his scarf.

Sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t just a damn distraction technique. He couldn’t concentrate on anything longer than a few minutes before something would drag his attention back to the thought of finally, actually fixing her. Then it would be overshadowed by all the doubt crowding his thoughts—the spy, the RED team, the “benefactor.”

That last one, that worried him.

The choice dogged him. He would wake in the morning mad as hell the spy would try to lure him into such an obvious trap, then feel his resolve vanish as he watched the Pyro pretend to make her axe and flare gun talk to each other in the locker room. Back and forth, back and forth, quick enough to give him whiplash. Dell fell asleep picking over every detail of his conversation with the spy.

It got so bad the little hallucinations he’d get now and again—thanks to the same damn dispenser that had gotten him into this whole mess—started cropping up harder and faster. They were stress-driven, apparently. Now instead of just newly-hatched phoenixes he caught himself hearing his machines respond to his thoughts, or saw old college friends and men from his time in the oil fields out of the corner of his eye. The worst of these was the time he startled awake in the middle of the night to find a boy he had known from the fields screaming at him, begging to be saved from the flaming oil dripping from his skin. In terror Dell grabbed the closest thing at hand—his lamp—and flung it.

The vision vanished, and the lamp shattered against the wall. With a racing heart Dell hunted for him in the corners of his room for almost a minute before he realized what had happened.

It had to stop. And once again, the Pyro made up his mind for him.

Dell was counting the minutes till the siren in the near-dark when it happened. The Pyro had been sticking to him like glue today, spychecking and defending his gear. But now she was standing perfectly still in the snow, looking off into the distance beyond the half-fallen fence again. Her fingers played over her flamethrower’s pipes and tubes in slow, absent motions. Dell watched her for lack of anything else to watch.

After a while, she turned to look at him, then trudged over through the snow. A foot or so away she stopped, shifted her weight, and reached up to pop the filter on her mask. “Engineer?”

“Yeah?”

When she didn’t say anything else he figured she’d forgotten what it was she’d wanted. Instead she was looking around and around them, like she had never seen any of it before. Dell was about to tell her to shut the filter before she got frostbite when she spoke.

“Did I ever … did I ask you to do something? A long time ago?”

The tone of her voice, the meekness and uncertainty and the utter sanity within it, made his blood turn to ice. Not again. He’d thought these episodes had stopped for good. She hadn’t had one in months. “Like what?” he said.

He knew perfectly well what she meant.

The Pyro, however, seemed unsure. “Where are we?”

“Cold side of Hell.”

“Oh …”

The way she said it snagged at something deep within him. Resentment crawled through his skin, and he couldn’t stop the sneer pulling at his face. How dare she be this weak? How dare she reduce herself to this, and leave him with the aftermath?

How dare she?

 “Scout,” she said at last. “I asked you to—to … did you ever–?”

“No,” Dell snapped. “No, for God’s sake, I didn’t, and I don’t plan to.” She drew up her shoulders, a little, when his voice went sharp at the edges. It just made him madder. And why not get mad? She wouldn’t remember anything he said anyway. Dell wet his lips and swallowed and let the dam burst. “Talk to him your own damn self, hear me? What in the hell did you do to the boy? D’you even remember? You don’t remember anything else!” He stopped for breath, glaring at her, daring her to do something. She did nothing. Dell spat. “I haven’t got a clue why he hates you so much, but I sure as anything bet you deserve it. So, no, Pyro, I didn’t ever apologize to Scout for you, and I’m not going to!”

“Whoa hey what? Apologize to me for what?”

Dell about dropped his wrench in the snow at the sound of Scout’s voice. The kid had come up on them out of nowhere, and now he stood jogging in place, rubbing at his arms through his coat with his bat tucked in the crook of an elbow. When he noticed the Pyro, his face went from curious to disdainful.

That was what Dell got for shouting. He tried to recollect himself. “Nothin’, Scout.”

“Nothin’? Nothin’,” Scout said, squinting at him. “I ain’t deaf, Engie, okay, I heard you, apologize, apologize to me for what? Sparky—Sparky here got somethin’ to say to me?”

“I said nothin’.”

Scout’s gaze hardened. “Hey, look, pal, I ain’t—you talkin’ about me, I wanna know about that, are you keepin’ shit from me?” His eyes cut to the Pyro again. “You ain’t tellin’ me somethin’?”

God, the Pyro had gone and gotten him into trouble again. Dell reached up and rubbed at his temple beneath his hardhat, leaning back against the sentry. “No.”

The way Scout looked at him when he said that was the same kind of look his dog gave him when he had to drop it off at a neighbor’s during his jobs: blind-sided, unexpectedly hurt. It vanished as quick as it came, replaced with dawning realization. “Yeah, you are,” he said, slower than he said most things. “Keepin’ secrets. I thought we was on a team here, man.”

 

 

In the distance, the siren wailed. Dell didn’t move to pack up his kit, as much as he wanted to. Scout stayed rooted to the spot. His expression kept getting sharper and sharper the longer things went without anyone speaking.

“So what you just, you just gonna stand there,” Scout started up again. Dell sighed and folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t, don’t freakin’ sigh at me, old man, start talkin’!”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Oh I dunno maybe you could start with tellin’ me what you ain’t tellin’ me!” His voice ratcheted up with every syllable, and when it hit the top it stayed there. As he spoke he kept glancing at the Pyro, a fact that did not escape Dell’s notice. “Don’t act like I’m stupid, I ain’t got no Ph. D.s an’ I ain’t ever went to no college but I ain’t friggin’ stupid, alright, you got that? You got that? You think it’s okay to go keepin’ secrets with the idiot here? You ain’t no better’n the rest of us just ‘cuz you’re so smart—”

“I never said anything approaching that effect.”

“You even fuckin’ talk like you think you’re better than the rest of us,” Scout finished, fingers white around the grips of his bat.

From the corner of his eye, Dell could see the Pyro, her shoulders hunched and tense as she watched them. As Scout launched into another rant he wondered if she’d lost her lucid moment yet. Probably had. They never lasted long.

“You ain’t even listenin’ to me!” Scout barked, waving his bat at Dell. It was less a bat and more a chunk of wood embedded with broken screws and narrow railroad spikes, no longer sports equipment but a dangerous weapon. Dell supposed, later, that was what set her off.

The Pyro leapt forward the moment Scout brandished the bat, dropping her flamethrower in the snow. She seized the bat with nothing but her gloved hands, even though it was still a safe distance from Dell—even though Dell didn’t think Scout would really attack him, angry as he was.

The Pyro, though? That was another story. The instant Scout realized why his bat wasn’t moving Dell swore his eyes actually flashed. He ripped the bat away, making the Pyro yell in pain as it sliced through her glove, and shoved her, hard.

She yelped, stumbling backwards with both hands coming up to protect herself. “You,” Scout was saying again, turning on her, “yeah, you’re the real creep, ain’tcha, moron, I oughta cram this right up your stupid mask—”

A disgust Dell had not heard in a long time issued through the open filter. “Screw you!”

Scout’s eyes widened a fraction, his eyebrows lifted, and then they were furrowed so deep as to never shift again. “Freak,” he growled, “why don’t _you_ tell me, huh? How about you talk, huh, you used to know how to talk. I ain’t buyin’ your stupid act and I never have, you ain’t even freakin’ human, you—”

The Pyro grabbed his bat again, at the base, near his hand. He yelled and tried to wrench it away, but she had a grip on it this time, and her weight was behind her when she pulled.

It didn’t help her much when he kicked her in the side of the leg, his reach to his advantage. She fell to one knee, and that was all Scout needed to get the bat out of her grasp. He wrapped both hands around it and brought it down square in the middle of her back. A loud, ringing crack split the air as it slammed into her oxygen tank, and the impact dropped her like a pile of coal.

 _BEEP_ , went the sentry.

Scout visibly flinched at the sentry’s target-lock alert. His eyes cut upward found Dell, where he was crouched in the snow with his hand poised over the sentry’s manual controls.

“Boy,” Dell ground out, “you are real close to a whole lot of trouble.”

Disbelief flickered through Scout’s face. “You’re kiddin’.”

Dell turned his head just a fraction, raised an eyebrow.

He counted five seconds before Scout let his shoulders go slack. A laugh wheezed out of him. “I don’t believe this. He started it, you freakin’ saw that, I wasn’t doin’ shit, I didn’t even hurt ‘em.” He glanced down at the Pyro, now on her hands and knees in the snow, then back at Dell. “And you’re gonna shoot me over that. Over wantin’ some friggin’ answers.”

“I’m not going to do anything I don’t have to.”

“Whatever,” Scout said. “Just, you know what, _whatever._ Nice, man, nice, glad I know where I stand with you, glad to know I ain’t even worth as much as the goddamn pinhead.” He let the end of the bat drop to the snow, still staring at Dell. “Thanks. Thanks a lot. I’m leavin’. Okay? I ain’t hurting your freakin’ girlfriend, don’t you go shooting me in the fuckin’ back.”

Dell did not move. He didn’t until Scout had stalked away and disappeared into the base.

The Pyro picked herself up out of the snow. The filter on her mask had popped back into place when she hit the ground. She staggered upright, nearly fell, then steadied herself. Glancing around, her gaze first landed on her flamethrower, and she trotted over to it to gather it back up. Cradling it in her arms like a puppy, she turned to Dell, and paused.

“Hhengy?”

“ _What_.” His voice was shards of ice in his mouth.

He could feel her hesitation. “Um … nhhvhrmmhnd.”

When he got back to his workshop, the RED spy was waiting for him.


	10. 10: Metanoia (1)

### 10\. met·a·noi·a (1) _|ˌmetəˈnoiə|_
    
    
    1. a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.

 

* * *

 

“Where are we going?”

Engie didn’t answer her, he just sped up, and the Pyro was confused.

They were out past dark again and it was cold and she wanted to be inside. Demo was going to tell her a story about a sea monster tonight he’d said and now she wasn’t going to get to hear about the sea monster because Engie was taking her somewhere. It seemed kind of familiar like maybe they’d done this before, and not long ago, but she wasn’t sure if she had made that up or not, sometimes she made things up. He’d said Pyro here, and given her one of her flare guns, and then he’d put his little silver gun in one of his pockets and put on his coat and everything. Then he had taken her by the wrist and they were walking outside, in the dark, in the cold.

It was hard to see. Engie had a little flashlight but he wasn’t using it, she’d seen him pocket that too but even though it was dark he hadn’t turned it on. The stars were hiding and she kind of wondered if maybe they were hiding from Engie because he was in one of those moods where he didn’t talk. They were kind of scary moods because he always went really fast and he never explained anything and mostly the Pyro just kind of tried to stay out of his way when he was like that.

So when he’d pulled her out into the snow and left her to plod behind him she didn’t say much. But after a while they’d walked way past middle, they’d gone right through the cliffs and up to the building where the Pyro and everyone else had spent days and days trying to catch the big circle inside it. She had never been here when it was dark, before. A single white light glared out at them from the building’s exterior as they drew near. “Engie?” the Pyro said.

“Shh,” he said. He was peering around, all sharp edges. “Pyro, look here. We’re—we’re doin’ a new game, okay?”

“Game? Really?”

“Keep your voice down,” Engie said. “Yeah—a game, yeah. With RED. It’s a different game from normal, so the rules are different.”

The Pyro stared at him in awe. A new game with the redthings? They’d never once played a new game, not that she could remember—they played get-the-papers and catch-the-circle and stop-the-cart, and a couple other ones, but they were mostly just different versions of the same game. “What’re the rules?” she pressed. Maybe it was a game you could only play at night.

“First rule is you got to be quiet.” The Pyro nodded. “Second—you don’t shoot at nobody unless I say so or I do it first. Nobody, got it?” She nodded again. “Okay. Them’s the big rules. There’s probably other ones but I’ll tell you ‘em later if they come up, okay?”

“Okay. Is this a sneaking game like when Scout takes stuff outta the fridge at night?”

“What? Sure.”

The Pyro wondered if he’d actually heard her or if he was just saying that. She thought about repeating herself when Engineer looked up at something over her shoulder. She turned around to see what it was and every muscle in her body went stiff and tense all at once like something had twisted a knob and yanked them tight.

The redmask was coming towards them through the snow. The Pyro growled and almost reached for her flare gun, then remembered what Engie had said. He hadn’t really meant redmask, had he? Redmask was different. Redmask was bad.

He stopped a few yards away, a cigarette smoking in his hand. Next to her she hear Engineer sigh. “Stay put,” he said, and he started off through the snow toward redmask.

The Pyro whined to herself, but did nothing else. What else could she do? But if this was part of the new game, she didn’t like it.

Nothing happened when he got to redmask. She watched them so closely she thought her eyes might fall out of her head, but still nothing happened. They were just … talking. No fighting, no weapons drawn, though once Engie made a sharp motion with his hand like he was brandishing his wrench. She jumped at that, but the redmask stayed still and said something, and Engineer dropped his hand.

Then Engie was coming back, leaving redmask behind him in the snow. The Pyro huffed to herself. Why were they talking all of a sudden? It was dangerous. Someone would get hurt.

When he reached her she wanted to grab his hand and run back home but she was cold and the suit and her joints were all stiff and Engie usually didn’t like it when she did things like that anyway. So instead she stood in the snow and shivered and was unhappy.

But then Engineer was there and she could stop focusing on how she was unhappy. “What are we doing?” she asked, desperately hoping the answer would be “Leaving.”

It wasn’t. “We’re playin’ that game I told you ‘bout now, remember?”

“I—” She looked at the redmask, standing as stock-still and poised as a cat, “I don’t wanna.”

“Well, we got to, sorry. It’s—it’ll be alright, Smoky. This is a good game, okay? If you do all what I say things are goin’ to get better, promise.”

Better? Better like Engineer would stop talking to redmask and they would go home and they would win the fight and they could go home-home, their real home in Texas where it was warm and she could play with Engie’s dog? Better. “Okay,” she said. One game and things would get better.

“Good girl. C’mon, then.”

She followed him crunchcrunch through the snow, all the way over to redmask, and as much as she wanted to hit him just because he was redmask and he was awful she didn’t because Engie said. She kept her hands to herself all the way through the snow and just followed Engie who was following redmask who had his own tiny flashlight. She was a good girl.

They went way, way around the bases and the cliffs and kind of looped some and Engie once broke a branch off a tree they passed because he was very strong and that was a thing he could do, and he used it on the snow to make it look like they hadn’t walked through it. She had wanted to know if that was part of the game, but Engineer just grunted and threw the branch over into a snowdrift, and then they were following redmask again.

They walked for a long time (but maybe it wasn’t, the Pyro wasn’t very good at time really) and then they stopped, just outside some old brown cabins that had so much snow on their roofs, pushing them down into a bend, that they looked like the horse Engie had to do something to for the neighbor lady last summer. It was an old horse and it had been brown too and the Pyro gave it some sugar and petted its head while Engie and the lady talked, and they didn’t talk a whole lot, and they mostly did it in quiet voices. The lady had been sad, she remembered. The old horse was sick and its eyes were all cloudy and dark and Engineer had said it had “colic” and that it was “swayback” before he shot it in the head. That’s what the cabins’ roofs looked like, like they were swayback. Maybe they had colic, too. When she asked where the respawn for the horse was Engineer had just sighed and taken her by the arm and marched her outside and told her to sit and wait. She had still not found out where the horse respawn was.

 

 

 

 

Most of the doors were shut, ice glazing the handles like wet sugar, but redmask brought them to the most swaybacked house of all and its door swung open with a touch. Inside they went, and the Pyro thought it was somehow even colder in there than outside. Beside her, Engineer rubbed at his arms, and when he cleared his throat he puffed out dragonsmoke. “This it?”

“Indeed it is.”

At first the Pyro couldn’t see what they were talking about, not until redmask reached up to the crumbling mantlepiece of the cabin’s fireplace. He lifted down a very familiar object. “Medigun?” Engie said, and he sounded surprised.

Redmask turned, the backpack dangling from one hand and the gun itself in the other. “I suppose you were expecting a dispenser?”

“S’pose I was.”

“Mm. No, our medic incorporated it into his standard kit after it succeeded on me. Much more efficient, more portable.” He set it down on the remnant of a table, propped up by a bunch of bricks. The Pyro shifted her weight from one foot to the other. This game didn’t make sense.

“So you just—you’re going to turn it on, let it go? How long’s it take?”

“On myself it was a matter of perhaps forty minutes’ time. For her …” Redmask was looking at her. The Pyro bared her teeth at him and was glad Engineer couldn’t tell her off for it. “Significantly longer.”

Engineer answered in his irritated voice. The Pyro tensed up at the sound of it, but he wasn’t aiming it at her. “And how much longer is that? An hour, five hours, all night? She was on it approaching seven, seven and a half hours at least, and that was after she’d been on it for five already—”

“Don’t get testy with me, please,” redmask said. “I am neither a doctor nor a man of science. All I can assure you of is that it _will_ work, though the case may be such that it will not be done over the course of a single evening.”

The Pyro was still trying to figure out what they were talking about. Engineer shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at the medigun. After a moment, he said, “All right. Let’s get to it, then.”

 

* * *

 

It took a solid five minutes to get the Pyro to sit quiet in one spot, and Dell wished he’d brought something to distract her with. In the end it was the spy that solved the problem: he produced his cigarette lighter, a flawless silver thing, and put it in her hands. She went very still, then began flicking it on and off, on and off, on and off, as easily as she used to. There was an eerie grace about the effortless snap of her wrist.

When the spy pointed the medigun at her and locked the handle into its “on” position she stopped, for just a moment. She looked at the medigun, and then at Engineer. “Hht hhr hwe dwhng nhw?”

“Part of the game, still,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. Half a second later she went back to huddling over the lighter, a little tenser than before.

 

 

 

 

“If I may inquire,” said the spy the next night, startling Dell from the stillness that had again come over them. “What is the reason for your dedication to her? I have my theories, but I prefer to know the facts.”

“Well … she beat you half to death for me, for one,” he said. He glanced over at the spy, and then back to the Pyro, who sat absorbed in the picture book he had thought to bring this time. Probably she couldn’t she even see the pages, but it occupied her anyway. “And on account of the fact being she wouldn’t have ever got into this mess if not for my machines. I ain’t one to leave my messes unfixed. I like to think I’m a decent human being.”

The spy hummed contemplatively. He had a cigarette in his mouth, unlit, same as Dell had seen BLU’s own Spy do even if there was no lighter to be had. “I confess that the story you told me in your workshop left me intrigued. How is it she came in contact with the altered substance for so long?”

For a long time the only sound was the hum of the medigun. Dell exhaled, feeling his resolve slip away. The spy had taken them this far, after all. “I don’t know for sure. All I know is it wasn’t an accident.”

“As in …”

“As in I told her to stay away from it and she used it on herself anyway.” Dell wet his cold-cracked lips, watching the Pyro, wholly absorbed in the pages of her book. “I don’t know why. My best guess, I … when you used the thing, before you got fixed back up, did you have any memory trouble?”

“None such as I can recall.” The spy paused. “But that itself may mean nothing.”

“Right, well. Whatever the hell Medic used in that concoction of his, he told me it had a reputation for memory loss. And of course I told Pyro, figured she had a right to know if she noticed anythin’ weird since she got a dose of the stuff already.” He shook his head. “I said that, said it could make her forget—and I don’t know. Maybe she forgot I told her. Maybe she wanted to forget something, I don’t guess I would be surprised. She had herself more trouble than a dog’s got fleas.”

The Pyro moved on from the book and started playing with the spy’s lighter again, running her gloved fingers through the flame over and over.

“I see,” the spy said at last. “Have you considered that you may be doing her a disservice?”

“What?”

“You may be undoing her last wish, as it were. To forget.”

Dell turned his head and fixed him with a stare, daring him to expand on the thought. The spy met his gaze in the same calm manner he did everything else. “To be certain, no one would wish her exact fate upon themselves. But whatever her problems may have been, she has certainly forgotten them.”

“She wasn’t right in the head.”

“Perhaps not, but—”

“No,” Dell growled. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see the way she was acting. She wasn’t eating, I don’t think she was sleeping anymore. Something happened, and I think whatever happened when she got put on the dispenser the first time is what pushed her to that. And I think it pushed her right off the edge in the end, because I have never seen so much fire in a woman before or since, and I will not believe that she would just give up like that unless she was not in her right mind.”

When the last words came out of his mouth a wash of dizziness came over him, and he had to stop entirely to catch his breath. The spy was quiet. Neither of them said anything further, until they parted ways when the cold became too much to withstand any longer.

“Your resolve is admirable,” the spy said as Dell helped the Pyro (shivering again, her suit icy to the touch) to her feet. “Presumptuous, but admirable. I hope, for your sake, that you are right.”

“See you tomorrow,” Dell said, and pulled the Pyro out into the snow with him.

Tomorrow started earlier than anyone on the BLU team would have liked. It was still dark when a huge bang from the mess, loud as a gunshot, rang out through the building. It dragged the team out of their rooms almost as one, but Dell staggered in last, groggy from the late night before. They had crowded just inside the door of the mess, and he had to push through Sniper and Spy to get a look at what the hell had caused the noise.

It took him a second or two of squinting to understand what he was looking at, and even then it seemed too bizarre to be real. The massive oak table had been knocked over onto its side and lay like a ship run aground in the middle of the room. Scout had already darted past all of them to get a better look. “Leg give out?” Dell said.

Scout leaned over the broad side, peering over the edge, and scowled. “Nah,” he said, “just your pet freak.”

Dell blinked and found himself crossing to see for himself. The rest of the team followed him. He put both hands on the edge of the heavy wood and looked down, and sure enough there was the Pyro, hunched into a ball against the far end of the table where the leg met the top. She had her mask on, as always, but the suit seemed to be missing. Instead she was knotted into a thick blanket with just her bare feet and fingertips sticking out, and her shoulders trembled. Scout swatted at the air in front of her face, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Dell could feel the team’s eyes on him. He ignored them and stared down at her, as if someone else would do something about her if he didn’t.

No one did. Dell bit down on his lip and circled around the fallen table to drag her out of the room. When she got up it was slow and clumsy and not a word left her, nothing at all even in spite of the rough way he hauled her along by the arm. The only sign of life he got was when they stopped in front of her room. He let go of her arm and she took two steps away from him, rubbing where his grip had been. She was still shaking, and the blanket had slipped off her shoulders enough he could see her ratty t-shirt and shorts beneath. The effect was eerie with the mask.

“Go get ready for work,” he told her, and she disappeared into her room without a word.

That night Dell dragged the space heater and a battery pack cannibalized from one of his projects out with them to the cabin. Even in the dark, he caught the look of relief of the spy’s face when he set it up.

The silence this time was even shorter than before. RED’s spy was a curious bastard. “She tried to set your house alight, you said?”

Christ. “Yeah,” he said in spite of himself.

“Unusual mode of introduction.”

“Strangest damn thing I’d ever seen. Turns up in the middle of the cotton fields dragging that flamethrower around, mask on, all of it. Tried to torch me. Would’ve, if she hadn’t been outta gas.”

The Pyro had claimed herself a spot on the floor nearest the window, tonight, and between playing with her lighters and fiddling with a stuffed bear—the very same she’d presented to Dell that night he destroyed the poisoned dispenser—she watched the moon. It watched her back, and through the frosted glass and shattered timber it drew a chiaroscuro across the planes of her mask.

She had been doing that for a few minutes as they spoke, unmoving. Now she shifted, looking down at the bear. She lifted her head and gazed over the room, her movements sluggish, until she came to the spy.

A strangled kind of noise escaped the mask. Before Dell could so much as open his mouth she had scrambled backwards, spine slamming into the wall. She kept trying to push herself further away, feet feebly skidding across the wooden floor, staring at the spy. “Hey,” he said, getting up and going to her, “now, what’s—”

She latched onto his arm the moment he came within reach, burying her face in the crook of his elbow. The edges of her mask dug into his skin. He grimaced, trying to pry her off. “Dammit, Pyro, you’re fine. You’re fine.”

Unresponsive. Her shoulders trembled, her hand dug into the meat of his arm and the mask pinched his skin. Dell shut his eyes and stretched out his free arm to turn off the medigun. “Step outside,” he said over his shoulder.

“Pardon?”

“Leave a minute. Think you spooked her.”

It was too dark to tell if the spy’s expression changed. After a moment, though, Dell heard the floorboards creak and the door swing open, then shut.

It took a long minute of forced reassurances that she was okay before she let up her death-grip on his arm. Her breathing still came hard, and she stared wildly around the room, but he managed to get her to let go of him. He stood up and backed away a step to get out of her range. By the time the spy came back he’d quieted her and gotten her focused on the lighter again. She was twitchy for the rest of the night.

The Pyro wasn’t right after that day. She quit talking entirely. Sometimes he’d see her spook at shadows, at air, and there were two more occasions where she panicked and clung to him for refuge, once on the field. Demo asked him if she’d been feeling alright, and Soldier made mention that neither of them had been around much after hours.

When Dell laid it out for the RED spy almost a week after they’d begun, the son of a bitch had shrugged. “The damage was extensive,” he said, turning the medigun on. “And we have not been able to treat her longer than an hour or so each night. Give it time, Conagher. It will work.”

“How damn long is it supposed to take?” Dell answered, guiding the Pyro to her now-customary spot on the floor (away from the window). The medigun’s beams razed across his skin before he stepped back. “Our team’s starting to notice we ain’t around. They’re going to be asking questions before too long.”

“I have already said I do not know. I can hardly involve my own team in this venture. We are all three of us breaking contract as it is.”

“Contract. Right,” Dell muttered, dropping into a rotting wooden chair.

 

* * *

 

Something, the Pyro thought, was following her.

The first time it had come was fuzzy and a blur of being scared and upset and then there was a big bang and she wasn’t in her room anymore because it had chased her out of it, she was in the kitchen feeling sick, and then everyone else was there and Engineer made her go back into her room. It hadn’t been there anymore so it was okay but then it was out in the snow with everyone else. She tried to keep still and quiet to avoid it, but that didn’t work. It would rear up in front of her whenever it liked, on the field, at dinner, a shapeless, dreadful spasm in her vision. The only thing she had discovered that kept it at bay were her stories. When she had a story to think about the something following her wouldn’t be as loud or as huge. The books helped, some, but she couldn’t make sense out of the black smears on every page. She felt like if she could just get someone to read to her or tell her a story she might be able to ignore the something long enough that it would go away.

But everyone she went to brushed her off. She was afraid to ask Engineer because he’d been so mad about everything lately. She couldn’t remember him ever being this mad this much before but her memory wasn’t so good so maybe this was normal? Demoman, in his bright, sulfury workroom, sent her away with an apology when she came to him with a book, saying he was too busy making more ammo. Spy and Soldier and Sniper didn’t want to either. Medic started to lecture her out of one of his medical books once, but then one of the white owls Pyro had seen around outside burst out of the headless cadaver he had been doing things to and that distracted him too much to finish. When she asked Heavy he just gave her the same distracted kind of look Engineer sometimes did, and shook his head without a word.

That left Scout. She mostly didn’t like asking Scout anything, not even pass the salt, because he always glared at her and usually he would say something that got Engineer mad at him. And the last time she had said anything to Scout he had hit her with his bat and he had yelled at Engineer and she just didn’t really want to talk to Scout. She couldn’t even remember what she had said to make him so mad.

So the Pyro just kept to herself, trying to read her books, making up stories about the pictures of the animals and people inside the pages. But the something was still there, and it got closer every night.

More nights went by, and they all seemed to stretch into one another. Her and Engie and redmask would go out to the swayback house and she would sit and have something like Medic’s heal-gun go over her, except it was red and not blue. Then Engineer would help her up and they would go back to the base and he would go between asking her how she felt and ignoring everything she said.

She didn’t know how she felt. Wrong. Nervous. She wanted the game to be over. She wanted to get out of the cold, but even when she went to her room and curled up in all the blankets she had she never seemed to get warm. There was a tiny crack in the window that used to have something plugging it up but she had mistaken it for a … for something and pushed it all the way out and now her room was cold all the time. Probably she could have gotten Engineer or Demo or somebody to fix it but she kept forgetting until she was already out of her suit and too sleepy to get back in it.

One day—she couldn’t have said how long after the game had begun—one day she was doing just that, had knotted herself up in her blankets after one last tour around the base, trying to get someone to read to her. No one had given her a second glance, and she was getting so desperate she almost asked Scout. She hadn’t but by the time she got to her room she wished she had. The something hadn’t been around all day, and somehow that made her feel worse than knowing where it was.

The cold still eked through the windows to claw at her. It was cold enough she had just taken her mask and boots and gloves and things off and not her whole suit. Eventually she got bored and shrugged her way out of the top half of the suit and knotted the sleeves around her waist the way she had seen Demo do sometimes with his jumpsuit so she could run her fingers over her arms. Everyone else had arms that were mostly smooth and mostly one color all the way down, as far as she could tell, but hers were laced with textures and shades of deep ochre and pinkish-white against her terracotta-red and they were interesting to look at. Engineer had said they looked like topographic maps, once. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or what a topographic map was, or how her arms had gotten that way.

She could only do that so long, though, and then Pyro was digging out her book from where she’d hid it under her pillow. The colors inside seemed duller than she remembered as she balanced it on her lap. She tried turning the pages slowly at first, and then flipping through them so fast they blurred, but the colors stayed the same, and none of the pictures moved like they sometimes used to. The words stayed as fuzzy nonsense, though if she stared hard enough at them sometimes she thought she could almost make them out.

Outside, a wind snarled against her window, slamming the glass in its frame and blowing cold air into the room. She winced, and pulled her head under the covers. Everything was dark, and for a minute or two she pretended she was in an egg, just like the story about the phoenix. The last time Engineer had told her it he hadn’t told it right, he had said the phoenix just burned herself up and floated away as smoke in the end. He used to say, after the flames had ate her up, that in the ashes there was beautiful golden egg that hatched into another phoenix—the same phoenix, but different. Better.

The blankets weren’t as warm as a phoenix’s egg probably would be. The Pyro huffed out her breath to see if it might light up the dark. Maybe it would be aflame like dragon’s breath. She wished she could be a dragon. Demo said dragons were big and strong and smart and never had to do anything they didn’t want to. A dragon could have quit playing Engineer’s game any time it wanted.

But nothing happened except the air getting a fraction warmer. Pyro sighed and took the blankets off from her head, and after a second of shivering pulled her suit back on all the way. Maybe she would go and ask Scout to read to her after all. Maybe he would know a dragon story.

She looked around. Her room had become so drab and gray over the last few days. The walls were painted concrete, and the paint was flaking everywhere, in some spots gone entirely. The drawings she had taped to the walls weren’t as vibrant. She didn’t remember if that was new. Her mask and flamethrower and boots were on the ground, where she’d left them, and next to those was—

Scout.

Scout was in her room.

He just stood there, watching her. She couldn’t remember him coming in and he wasn’t saying anything, and she had kind of an idea that he wasn’t supposed to be here. But despite herself she leapt out of bed, dragging the covers down to the floor, ignoring the chill that hit her bare feet. She almost tripped over the blankets but kept her balance, and with her book held tight to her chest she stumbled toward him. If he was here already maybe he’d …

“Scout,” she said, stopping in front of him. He was taller than her, much taller than she remembered him being, tall like a stork or a heron. The Pyro curled her fingers around her book, staring up at him, trying to figure out what was wrong. His teeth were bared, like Engineer’s dog when it was angry or afraid. He was wearing red—he _was_ red, red all over, red dribbled out of his nose and ears and pooled in the corner of his lip, where the flesh had been torn, and that was why his teeth were bared, he didn’t have any lips to cover them anymore. Red poured from the big hole in his chest, over his heart, gushing out in gouts to soak his clothing.

The sick feeling came back. The same feeling she got from the something following her, but now it was just Scout. Pyro swallowed hard. Scout didn’t say anything. “Will you,” she started, and wished she hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t take it back, now. “Can you tell me a story?”

“You want me to tell you a story,” Scout said. “Me.” She nodded. Scout laughed and he sounded all wrong—he sounded familiar but in the wrong way. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. So once upon a time, not real long ago, there was a girl who wasn’t really a girl.” He tilted his head way to the side, too far, like his neck was broken. “She looked like one and talked like one but she wasn’t really.”

“What was she?”

“A monster.” Scout tilted his head to the other side. “A horrible evil dragon that had disguised herself as a woman so no one would know.”

The Pyro felt her expression knot itself into something unhappy. Dragons weren’t evil, she wanted to tell him. Even in Demo’s stories, he said most of them were just upset about something, or misunderstood. But maybe there were evil dragons, so she didn’t say anything. “And,” Scout said, “one day she met a boy who could make fire dance. The dragon loved fire, and the things the boy could make it do, so she let him be, for a while. But monsters are monsters no matter what they look like.” Smoke was beginning to drift from his mouth and nose. “And dragons are jealous and greedy. She wanted the fire all to herself. So she ate the boy, and took his fire from him.”

“No,” she mumbled. She didn’t like this story. From the moment Scout had begun to talk her head had started pounding, and he didn’t really look like Scout anymore. He looked ghostly and pale and bloody, or sometimes he looked like the dragon he was telling her about, or sometimes he even looked like the woman the dragon had pretended to be. “You’re telling it wrong.”

“But the fire saw what she did and it got angry,” Scout said. “It tried to eat her, to get back at her. It bit off both her wings and then spat her out because she tasted so bad, she tasted like ash and charcoal. So the dragon escaped. She crawled off bleeding and dragons bleed lava. Everywhere she went, she set fires and destroyed homes and gobbled people up, _crunch, crunch, crunch._ She hurt everyone she ever came close to and the boy’s fire chased her the whole time, until it drove her to the ocean. She didn’t have her wings anymore, so she couldn’t fly away, and the fire had grown so large that even a dragon couldn’t escape it. The only thing she could do was run into the sea.”

 

 

 

 

Pyro blinked, flinching when she found her eyes wet and stinging, salt water rising to swallow her. Her head was swimming. She lifted a hand to steady herself, and the book she had forgotten she was holding fell to the floor with an ear-splitting crash. She glanced down at it and then at the rest of the room.

All the color had gone, now, leaving her with drab concrete. Her head felt clearer than it had in ages—like she had just woken up after sleeping too long. Her breathing was the only noise.

She fell back a step, and another, until she hit the bed and collapsed on it. For a few seconds she just sat there, staring at the spot where Scout had stood. He was gone now, a smear of red on the concrete floor the only indication he had been there, and even that vanished the next time she blinked.

He hadn’t finished telling the story. She would have to do it. The weight of the thought settled on her like a vulture.

She tried anyway. “So the dragon stepped into the sea,” Pyro told herself. “She let it swallow her up, and the fire—the fire watched as she drowned.”

Her head was throbbing.

“And everyone else lived happily ever after.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guest art for this chapter contributed by [iamtoothandclaw](http://iamtoothandclaw.tumblr.com), [wonderarium](http://wonderarium.tumblr.com), and [awkwardarbor.](http://awkwardarbor.tumblr.com) You guys rock!


	11. Interlude I.

Driving forward, looking back,  
she finds there is only the loosest bond   
between time and pain  
some things don’t pass,   
the injuries don’t heal  
they merely find a place in our guts and  
in our bones   
where they fitfully rest,   
tossing and turning between our knuckles and ribs  
waiting to wake   
as the shadows grow long.

— _Sharp Teeth_ , Toby Barlow.


	12. 11: Verschlimmbesserung

 

 

**ACT II.  
THE PYRE**

### 11\. ver·schlimm·bes·se·rung _(German)_
    
    
    1. a supposed improvement that makes things worse.

 

* * *

 

The days had begun to blur together. Around the third time he had looked the other way when the RED spy snuck through their defenses, Dell felt the last of his resolve give in.

“It’s doing nothing,” he told the spy that night at the shed, when he met them at the door. “Hell, I think it’s gone and made her worse.”

“Elaborate what you mean by worse.”

“What I mean by—” Dell grit his teeth to stay his tongue, glancing back at the Pyro. She stood just behind him, rocking gently on her heels, staring at the snow. “She ain’t acting right, she ain’t doing anything at all. You got to have seen her on the field, I watched her walk right past you today. Not so much as a sneeze. Ain’t talking to me, neither. Work gets done and she disappears.”

The spy, as maddeningly poised as ever, regarded first him and then the Pyro. “Surely you have considered that this could be a part of the process,” he said, his eyes lingering on Pyro.

“’Course I have. And I’ve considered the idea that maybe my idiot self has gone an’ fell for a trap.”

He got a shrug. “We both know there is very little else I can do to convince you of my good intentions, Conagher. Discontinue the treatment, if you wish.”

“Reckon I will,” Dell said, staring at the spy. “I reckon I’ll do just that.”

 

* * *

 

Things didn’t get better. They didn’t get worse, either, but that didn’t do much to comfort Dell.

Over the next few days he kept a closer eye on the Pyro. As much as he could, at least. She didn’t say a word to him, barely seeming to notice when he—or anyone else, for that matter—was around. Dell found himself relieved he hadn’t given into the temptation to use the damn “cure” on himself, if she was indicative of its results.

It was almost funny that he had thought he was sick of this mission before this mess started. Now it felt like every little annoyance was going to be the final straw: Demoman’s banter, Scout’s new habit of shooting him endless dirty looks, the way Heavy walked around the Pyro as if she might transform into a hellbeast at any second. It was like all of his nerves had been uprooted and exposed, hypersensitive to the smallest input.

The Pyro’s silence was perhaps the worst of it.

It was evening now, some four, five days past the Pyro’s last treatment. Dell had seen neither hide nor hair of the RED spy since that night, though he’d been backstabbed more than once. The BLU team had been pushed back to their final point once more that morning, and if their own Spy hadn’t managed an admittedly artful chain-stab seconds before Dell’s sentry was about to go down, laying out the RED pyro, heavy, and demoman in seconds, they would have lost. And the Pyro had been useless—Dell had watched her charge directly into minigun fire, stand staring at the RED scout as he smacked a baseball straight at her head, walk over the most obvious sticky-bomb trap he had ever seen.

Same as before, she had disappeared as soon as the fight was over. He’d near about beat down her door with his knocking when he went hunting for her before dinner. It was like the time she had fried Soldier’s face off when she had first arrived. At least then she’d thought she had a good reason to keep it locked.

He was thirty seconds off getting his tools and taking the knob off when the door creaked open. The Pyro looked out at him through the crack, still in full uniform. “Hwhat?”

Dell took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Hey. May I come in?”

Nothing. Dell had nearly decided to push his way in on his own when she stepped back, swinging the door open. He tried to force the rising irritability down, and went in.

“Depressing” was the first word Dell could think of to describe her room. The floor and walls were bare concrete, like the other dorms, and her bed was a drab nest of pilfered blankets. Same as the rest of the team, the Pyro had developed the tendency to bring little personal things with her to missions, but hers rarely made sense: what looked like a collection of petrified chicken bones sat beside a fat, raggedy plush kitten on her nightstand. Ripped-out coloring pages were taped to the walls at awkward angles. Her flamethrower lay propped up in a corner, the sturdiest-looking thing in the room. As Dell stepped through the threshold he cringed through his sweater. “Good God, Pyro, it’s freezing in here.”

She shut the door behind him, locked it, and looked at him for a long few seconds before making her way to the window set high in the wall. Wordlessly, she seemed to study it before pulling off one of her gloves and jamming a rubber finger into a crack between the glass and metal, wedging it tightly. Then she turned back to him and waited, as if expecting some reaction.

Dell ignored it. “Look,” he said, “we got to have ourselves a talk, okay? I don’t know why you been quieter as the grave, but it’s starting to spook me.”

Hesitantly, the Pyro nodded. That was more than Dell had expected, to say the least. Encouraged, he carried on. “What’s got you acting—off? You ain’t been talking to me, you ain’t been fighting right either.”

She shrugged, a feeble roll of the shoulders. Dell leaned his head back, stared at the ceiling, and counted to ten. “You ain’t even hearing a word I’m saying, are you. Do you even got a clue what’s going on? What I’ve been trying to do for you all these damn years?” When he looked back at her she was just watching him, leaning against the foot of her unmade bed. He didn’t try to control his temper. “I don’t know why I keep trying. Pauling was right, you ain’t my damn responsibility, I don’t owe you a damn thing. You did this to your own damn self, and, and here we are, finally I think I got somethin’ that might give you a second chance that you don’t even deserve—and this clamming up happens and I don’t even know if it’s the stupid medigun done it, or if you just up and decided you ain’t talking, or, or if the goddamn spy went and did something—dammit, Pyro, don’t stand there looking at me like some dumb cow, say something!”

The Pyro stood in silence, shoulders slack. Dell grit his teeth and rubbed at his temples. What else had he expected, anyway? She never responded well to pressure, she hadn’t even when she was sane. Losing his temper never got him anywhere, and doubly so with her; he just couldn’t help himself.

But then the Pyro said something. At first the words didn’t even register, bouncing off his tired and frustrated mind to echo off the concrete. He glanced up at her, and she slowly repeated herself.

“Hwhat dhh yhou hwnt mhe t’h sahy?”

Dell blinked at her, processing the muffled words. “God, Smoky, I don’t even know.”

She spoke again, soft at first, then rapidly increasing in volume, nothing but a stream of unintelligible mutterings that seemed to get faster and more violent. When was the last time she had said so much at once, Dell wondered, meeting the false gaze of her mask’s lenses. Maybe his mind was getting to him again—auditory hallucinations—he wouldn’t be surprised. It wasn’t like he could see her mouth moving.

Except she was getting louder, and now she stalked across the room, pulling up short inches in front of him. Her hands had curled into fists, positively bristling. “Pyro?” he said.

“ _Fhhk_ yhou!” she barked, so loud Dell actually flinched. “ _Fhhk_ yhou, yhou hhiec hhvm _ggdm_ _hht_ —” She launched into a snarling stream of words he couldn’t make out for the life of him. “—hll mhe hhthh hnn, hmhhm hnmg—” Her hand shot out like a serpent, snagging in his shirt collar and with terrifying ease she slammed him back against the door. He cried out when his head hit the wood, and her mask was so close to his face he could hear every ragged breath as it scraped through the filters. With a wild motion she drew back her other fist, and Dell felt the air whip along his cheek.

On instinct he grabbed for her raised wrist, and was surprised to find it was really there. It was taut and tense under his fingers; he so often forgot how strong she was. This was no hallucination. “Wait a minute, don’t—I can’t—I, I can’t get a damn word you’re saying.”

Those black lenses bored into him, and he could hear her labored breathing through the mask.

Slowly, enunciating even, she said: “Tehll mhe hwhat’s gwhng hnn.”

Engineer exhaled, long and slow. “You’re talking.”

“Nho shiht.”

 

* * *

 

There had been a fuzzy, unfocused blur. There had been a banging sound that she kind of thought had taken her a long time to recognize as someone knocking on the door. There had been Engineer, and there had been yelling, and then there had been anger.

There had been anger. It swept over Pyro like a tidal wave, dragging her into its depths before she could make sense of it, and it sharpened the edges of everything around her, turning them into shattered glass that warped the world into a funhouse mirror. When she had grabbed Engineer she was sure she would cut herself on him, he looked so sharp.

Engineer’s hand was tight around her wrist, and this close she could see his eyes widened beneath the goggles. She could feel his pulse under her ungloved hand, snarled in his shirt and against his neck. When he swallowed his Adam’s apple pressed against her knuckles. “All … all right. Let go, I’ll … do what I can.”

She didn’t like how he was looking at her, wide-eyed and strange, but Pyro slackened her grip. Every ounce of energy flooded out of her as she did, and all at once she wanted nothing more than to sit down. She let herself stumble back one step, and then another.

Engineer was still looking at her. His expression was changing, but to what she couldn’t tell. Expressions so often escaped her, she thought distantly. Something about this recollection was exhausting.

There was pressure against the backs of her knees, and Pyro lost her balance. Without noticing she had moved back all the way to the bed (and it was her bed, right?), and when her legs gave out she let herself sink down onto the mattress. Everything else in her mind felt like it rushed out of reach, like the tide, and she was left floundering.

Engineer. Engineer was here. “So,” Engineer said, “so you—you’re getting what I’m saying? You’re actually comprehending me. As in, as in, say, you know what ‘comprehend’ means.”

God, her hand was freezing. Why had she taken her glove off? For that matter where the hell was it? She folded her arms and stuck her bare hand against the joint of her other elbow, and tried to focus on what Engineer was saying. Comprehend. “I know what ‘comprehend’ means.”

“I didn’t get that. Look, we aren’t going to be able to have a conversation with that damn mask of yours.”

Her mask. She was suddenly impossibly aware of it, aware of the weight on her head and hanging off her face and of the dark spaces on the edges of her vision. “It’s my mask.”

“You don’t got to take it off, Pyro, for the love of … your filter unlatches. Remember?”

Mask. Filter. With her ungloved hand she reached up and fumbled with the smooth plastic. Muscle memory took over. She didn’t remember ever doing this before. “Happy?” she asked as it fell open, jamming her hand back against her arm and chest.

“Damn right,” Engineer answered. She glanced up at him, wishing she knew why her breathing seemed to have gotten a lot heavier without much warning. He was smiling. Grinning, even. Why was he grinning? “God in heaven. Hey, what—tell me what kinda tubing you use on that flamethrower again?”

“Petroleum hose,” Pyro said without thinking about it, then stopped, but there was more on the tip of her tongue. “Ni … nitrile rubber. I think. Two and one-fourths-inch diameter. Why?”

“What’s ah, dammit, what was it you said it takes to build a crematorium? Burn a body? You remember that?”

“Uh … one … sixteen hundred degrees.” Again it came easy as breathing. That seemed weird. Why did she know that? Why were her palms itching, suddenly?

“What about—”

“Can—can we not play goddamn twenty questions, can we not do that?” The look on his face, now almost manic, rattled her. The last thing she needed was more weird shit. The entire week had been one frightening blur of weird shit, and the more she thought about it the more she wondered if she hadn’t sleepwalked through it. It felt like a dream, now that she was awake or whatever, with unlikely interludes; something about a dragon—something about a ghost. She couldn’t remember. “I thought you were going to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“You’re better,” he said at once, clapping his hands together. “You’re fixed. It worked, dear God, it worked!”

“ _What_ worked?”

“Don’t you remember?—no, no, why wouldja. You—you weren’t well.”

“Engineer, I have _no goddamn idea_ what you’re talking about.” She leaned back on the bed, rubbing at her arms. A shiver rattled through her. “I don’t … why’s it so cold? Where’s my glove?”

“We’re up north, way north. Alaska or some such, Canada maybe.”

“What? I—when did we leave New Mexico?”

Engineer hesitated. “Well—we been here ‘round about two months, now, I figure.”

“Two months?” She narrowed her eyes as she stared down at the cement floor, a hundred questions suddenly fighting for her voice. “Two months. We … I thought we were just at—at that other place, with the bridge. Teufort,” she added, the name coming to her. “When did we leave Teufort? Are you telling me it’s September?” It had been July. It _had_ been July, that much she was certain of even if she wasn’t certain why.

“It’s damn close to Christmas, Pyro,” Engineer said.

“Don’t screw around.”

“God’s honest, it is.”

She felt her expression contort under the mask, and was glad Engineer couldn’t see it. July to December—that was six months. “That’s six months,” she said aloud. The weight of the statement did more for clearing her head than anything else had so far. “I only remember Teufort. Why can’t I—that’s _six months,_ we never left Teufort!” She looked up at him, feeling the heady rush of panic surge across her. He didn’t answer right away. “It’s _July_!”

“Now listen, girl, calm down,” Engineer said, pushing up off the door. He was coming toward her. She looked down at the ground again. “Breathe, okay? I’ll tell you everything, but you got to calm down. It’s December, it’s … mm. Do you remember what year it is?”

“It’s … it’s 1968.” She swallowed as she said it, brow furrowing. “1968.”

“Okay, well. Close, anyway. It’s 1970.”

Later Pyro would never be quite clear on how long the silence after that lasted, or what the sensation crawling up her throat had originally intended to be—vomit or shouting or sobs, no matter what it had been it made her stomach churn.

In the end it chose to be laughter, stark, mad laughter that hurt her sides and pierced the air. She sank down, head in hands, shoulders shuddering with the violence of her heaving lungs. She scarcely she heard Engineer call her name over the snarl of her own voice, and didn’t notice when he crossed the cement floor to her until he touched her shoulder. “This—this is a fucking joke,” she managed to get out, around the time something wet started crowding the corners of her eyes. “This is the worst fucking joke I’ve ever heard of. Y, you have a shit sense of humor.”

“Pyro—”

“I’m going to walk outside and it’s going to be ninety degrees and miserable and it’s going to be _July_ —”

Engineer tightened his grip on her. All her laughter died in an instant, but the shaking remained.

Eternity ticked by, and all she could do was dig her fingers into the rubber of her mask and try to steady her breathing. At some point Engineer sat down next to her, even rubbing her back when she came dangerously close to hyperventilating. By the time she had fought off the hysteria, an emptiness had settled deep within her, hollowing her out and nesting inside her. It was vast and devoid of anything at all. She could not remember anything else like it.

Though. That didn’t really mean much, apparently.

A desert wind formed from the wasteland she had become, and seethed up through her teeth. It forced out the question she no longer wanted answered:

“What happened to me?”

 

* * *

 

Engineer tried to explain. He might as well not have bothered. Pyro scarcely heard any of it.

What she did catch made her dizzy and sick, and none of the memories dredged up by his words made sense. He said something about a dispenser and she tasted blood and smoke. He said something about the RED spy and a medigun and she smelled cigarettes and her ears rang like as if someone was shouting. Everything was fuzzy, absolutely everything she could pull out of her sorry fucking excuse for a memory, until the very distinct recollection of Engineer knocking on her door not twenty minutes ago. As if everything until that moment was behind ice.

“And that’s that, mostly,” Engineer finished, shifting beside her. The mattress creaked angrily. “And now it looks like it’s worked.”

“Worked?”

“Fixed you. Except your memory. But that might be for the best, too. Fact is, I don’t … know if you’d want to remember it all. You were real sick, Pyro.” When she said nothing, Engineer sighed. “It’s a lot to deal with. You want me to get?”

Her chest tightened, catching her by surprise. A heavy dread seized her at the thought of being alone. “No,” she said, too quickly. “No, please.”

Engineer nodded, and to her relief did nothing more than that. For a time things remained quiet. It quickly became too much to bear. “Um,” she said, picking through what little she had actually been able to understand from his explanation. “So I … did I try to kill myself? With the dispenser? Is that what I did?”

The length of the silence before Engineer answered made the pounding in her head worse. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t think so, anyway. You don’t remember it?” She shook her head. “I guess that ain’t a surprise. Best guess I ever came up with was—well, it messed with your memory. I thought maybe you were trying to forget something.”

“It worked, then,” she mumbled. 

“What do you remember?”

Fire, she thought. Cotton fields. Filthy city streets and dusty Badlands barrens. Yellow grass in summer and fire and screaming men and fire.

“I … work with you and the—the others on the BLU team,” Pyro said, with as much confidence as she could muster. “We fight … RED team. I have pyromania.” She latched onto that fact, convicted. That much without a shadow of a doubt was true. It was comforting, even though naming it set her fingers to itching even worse. A need to watch something burn engulfed her. “I tried to light your house on fire, that’s how I met you. You almost shot me.”

Engineer was quiet. Waiting, maybe. The sense that she was missing something vital loomed, and she searched her thoughts once again. “I, um. I remember … I remember your garage. Building my flamethrower. Rebuilding. You have a dog named Shep.”

“What about your name?”

Her head reeled. “I’m … Pyro.”

“No, not—”

“I’m _Pyro._ ”

“Alright,” he said, holding his hands up. “Alright. What about mine?”

“Engineer?”

“My real name.” When she said nothing, he prompted gently, “Dell. Dell Conagher.”

“Conagher.” Something else. “Jackass with a shotgun.”

That won her kind of a smile. “That’s right. See, you remembered. That’s real good. The rest, y’know, maybe it’ll come with time, right? Ain’t all bad. Ain’t all bad at all, right? You’re better now. That’s what matters.”

Slowly, Pyro nodded.


	13. 12: Dépaysement

### 12\. dé·pay·se·ment _(French)_
    
    
    1. the feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country; disorientation due to experience of unfamiliar surroundings.

 

* * *

 

Darkness, interrupted by a steady, heavy thumping noise. Pyro became aware, vaguely, that she was awake. It took her somewhat longer to realize the thumping was the beat of her own heart.

Seconds ticked by. Something felt wrong, something in the air and in her lungs and nostrils. Pyro exhaled and took a deep breath, trying to dislodge it. Instead she started coughing, hard enough to hurt; she had, apparently, fallen asleep with her mask on. Pulling it off seemed harder than she thought it should. By the time she recovered, she was fully awake, but the feeling of unease remained. She sat up, and moment later she was cussing and diving back under the blankets, shivering with the cold. It was there in the dark that the previous evening returned to her.

Confusion and anxiety were the chief colors of the hour, she remembered slowly. Engineer had been there, until Scout darted through the base crowing dinner. Then he had left. She wasn’t hungry, and still hadn’t been when he brought her leftovers later, and once the initial shock wore off she wanted to be alone. Her stomach was a seething whisper, prodding her for food, but she ignored it.

“1970,” she said to the cold air. Her own voice sounded unfamiliar.

With a groan she poked her head out from the blankets and looked around at her room for what both did and did not feel like the first time. Her bed was pushed up against the far corner of the room, the broad side immediately opposite the door, leaving her a view of the cramped space. There was her flamethrower, leaning in the corner. There was her chemsuit, in a pile in the middle of floor like a shed skin. Her boots lay next to it, though she couldn’t recall taking any of the outfit off before crawling into bed. Her mask was tangled in the blankets beside her, where she had dropped it. There was a … something on the nightstand beside her, something that looked like an organized stack of tiny animal bones, and next to that a stuffed toy.

The rest of the room was barren. A flimsy-looking chest of drawers stood against the left wall, and a shallow indentation that must have meant to serve as a closet right next to it. There was no door, and there was nothing in there, though on the chest to its side lay a heap of lighters and matchbooks.

Pyro didn’t realize she had hauled herself out of bed and set foot on the cement floor until the shock jolted up her bare skin. She swore and sucked in her breath and steeled herself before scrambling the few steps over to the chest. The lighters spilled out over the chest as she shoved her hand in among them, and with as many as she could hold she bolted for the bed. In seconds she had pulled the blankets back over her shoulders and into her lap, and the shivering stopped once she lit the first lighter.

It was the brightest thing in the world—it put the pale sunshinebeginning to filter in through her window to shame. A deep sigh swept out of her aching lungs as she watched it burn. She let it go out, waited a moment, and lit it again.

Lit. Unlit. Like magic. Lit. Unlit. Lit …

Then it sputtered and the flame did not come. The spell broke. When it didn’t light again, no matter how she shook or sparked it, she gave it up for dead. There were more.

Fumbling for another, she found a Zippo. It was smooth and cool in her hand, a familiar weight, and she flipped the lid with an easy flick of her wrist. Satisfaction that she could still do that settled on her, and she tried the flint. It sparked and glowed and she sank back to watch it, too. She got lost in it, letting her eyes glaze over. If she kept very still she would have sworn the colors changed, moving from orange to green to purple, all through the rainbow.

Then she wasn’t in bed.

The vertigo hit her so hard she almost lost her balance. Her hand struck out for anything that might catch her, and anything happened to be the wall. She rammed her elbow against the cement and recoiled, hissing, before sort of dropping down to the floor in a heap.

When the pain faded and she opened her eyes again, the first thing she noticed was that she’d pulled on most of her suit. She had no memory of deciding to be done with the lighters, or that she should get out of bed and put the damn thing on, but there she was with the thing slung over her like a second skin.

Good to know that part of her brain was the same. Losing time could only be helpful.

With a groan, she got up, using the wall for support. As she did her hand brushed something taped to the flaking paint. Paper.

There were more like it on the other walls. They had avoided her notice in her initial sweep of the room. All of them were bathed in color, color, mostly golds and pinks and blues. Pyro looked back at the one she had touched. It took ages before she could make any sense of it.

The backdrop might have been a field, a fact given away only by the grinning flowers covering the green pigment. The sun was very plainly an orange, complete with leaf. On the lumpy horizon three figures stood—a purple pegasus, a gigantic ant, and a messy humanoid made up of blacks and blues. With a start she recognized it as a childish depiction of herself, in the suit. Moving around the room, she discovered all the rest were more of the same. The picture of herself kept reappearing.

Somewhere between the fifth and the seventh drawings, the empty, hollow feeling had gnawed its way back inside of her. It was easy enough to tear them down from the walls one by one, but in hindsight, turning her flamethrower onto them once she had was not the wisest course of action. It did not make her feel better, standing there and feeling her pulse course through her ears as the handful of papers curled and coiled into ash on the cement floor.

 

* * *

 

An unpleasant rush of déjà vu coursed through Pyro as she opened the door and stepped out into the hall, Shark in hand. Her body moved automatically, clockwork-like, taking her down the hall toward God-knew-where. It brought her to a door at the end of a wide and muddy hallway. She touched the knob, hesitated, then opened it. Inside was the rest of her team.

A few of them glanced up when she came in, but no one spoke to her. Engineer hadn’t noticed her entrance. He was in the corner, talking animatedly with Soldier, who was standing at full attention with his rocket launcher leaning on his shoulder and would have seemed to be ignoring his teammate were it not for the occasional sharp jerk of his head that sent his helmet sliding down further over his eyes. 

She had almost decided to try talking to Sniper when a red light mounted in a corner, above a security camera, began flashing. A low wail rose from somewhere deep in the base, like the cry of a prisoner.

On cue, the team started ahead. Pyro stood watching, forgetting what she was meant to do until Engineer grabbed her arm as he passed. “C’mon,” he said, as cheerful as the first day she had ever worked for BLU. “Let’s see what you still got.”

Off they went. There were none of the battle cries or excitement she dimly remembered, but even so Pyro could feel her pulse quickening, adrenaline and eagerness slipping through her blood. It wasn’t something she recalled from the Teufort fights, and it was strange, but she welcomed it. Anything was better than confusion.

The temperature dropped rapidly the further they got from the base, and when she, Engineer and Sniper stepped out of the cavernous warehouse into the snow the shock of the cold made her gasp. The temperature had to be below zero, and there was almost nothing between her skin and the suit. Shivering already, she puffed her flamethrower ahead of her as she moved, letting the curling Fire lick the quickly-cooling rubber. Just the sight of it warmed her a little, and she pulled the trigger a few more times.

“Cold?” Engineer asked beside her as they made their way between two stone cliffs. She looked over at him, nodding. “Ridiculous, ain’t it? Don’t believe that suit does you any good for keeping warm out in this, either. We can figure that out after work, how’s that sound? Or hell, maybe this damn stalemate’ll finally end,” he added brightly. “I’m feeling mighty good about today.”

The words had no sooner left his mouth then Pyro caught the flash of a red dot on his forehead. In the next instant his head shot backwards, chin jerking up. A vivid spray of red painted the air. His helmet hit the snow a fraction of a second before he did, shattered. Engineer collapsed, a quarter of his skull blown apart.

Pyro stood frozen in the slush beside him, gaping in horror as blood began to seep through the white. “Engineer?”

Nothing.

“Engineer—!”

Something shoved her hard enough to drop her into the snow. She twisted and looked up in time to see Sniper putting his rifle sight to his eye. He spared her only a instant’s glance before focusing back on his gun. “Go!” he hissed, “he’s out, leave ‘im. Go ‘round the left.”

Stupefied, she obeyed, leaving Engineer lying dead in the snow.

She staved off the panic until she found a little outcropping in the rock face, sheltered off the path. She pressed her back up against it just in time for the dam to burst. Her vision swam, her breathing came in stuttering gasps, Engineer was dead.

She curled her finger around the trigger of her flamethrower and pulled. The fire belched fruitlessly against the cliff face, melting what snow and ice had accumulated there and scorching the rock. She let it roar, heedless of the gas, forcing down the bile in her throat.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t. She’d only just started to remember things again and Engineer was the only one she could turn to and it wasn’t _fair_. She did that until her fuel ran out, shivering with more than cold, and crumpled down into the snow when her weapon sputtered and died. She wasn’t sure how long she sat there when a voice said, a little petulantly,

“We ain’t all spooky untouchable like you, okay?”

She yelped and tried to throw herself backwards, only managing to smack her head against the rock. When her vision cleared, a ghost stood over her—a ghost with a hardhat and blue overalls. “Whoa now,” Engineer said, putting out a hand as if to steady her. “I just asked what it was you think you’re doing.”

Pyro gulped down air, unable to take her eyes off him. “Y—you’re alive.”

“Well … yes.”

“But you—I saw—y-you got shot, the sniper—”

Even under the goggles she could tell Engineer was giving her a _look_. She shut her mouth and wrapped both hands around the flamethrower’s piping for comfort. “Hey,” Engineer said after a moment, “you didn’t forget about respawn, didja?”

“Respawn,” she repeated, and it was like turning the key to a vault. The memories came flooding back, the incident with Soldier and all of it. Stupid. Stupid … “I … no. No.”

Engineer looked her over another long moment, then stretched out his arm to her. A little too slowly, she took it, and got to her feet with his help. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m, yeah. I’m fine.”

“Alrighty,” he said, eyes still on her. Then he patted her arm and gestured for her to follow. Wordlessly she did so, already too tired to resist.

She was on edge the whole time Engineer set up his nest, starting at shadows and unable to keep still. Engineer chattered on to her without noticing, no worse for the wear. “The way I see it,” he said, “after work, we’ll go and find you something a sight warmer to wear under that thing. I don’t believe I ever could talk you into a sweater before. Then—here, got the dispenser set up. G’wan and refill that thing’s tank. Anyway …” Pyro let him ramble, not really hearing anything he said. All she wanted to do was sleep.

Engineer was interrupted by the approach of Medic and Heavy. Something seemed to grab Pyro and drag her forward. Compelled, she did not resist. When they came within range both stopped, as if waiting for something. For a stark, painful moment she wasn’t sure what it was she had meant to do, and then her body guided her again. She puffed her flamethrower just far enough from them that it would heat but not burn. After she did, as they passed, she stared after them in bewilderment. Why the hell had she done that?

_Engineer said Pyro, Pyro c’mon, just lemme see the darn thing, I got to test somethin’. She didn’t want to even though it was Engie because he wanted to use Shark on Spy and even though she didn’t like Spy very much she didn’t really want him to get eaten and Shark would eat him up. He won’t get eaten, Engineer said, and he pulled Shark from her hands, just I think I figured out how to mess up that damn disguise kit, it don’t stand up to heat._

Her flamethrower’s muzzle hit the snow with a crunch and Pyro shook herself back to the present. Anxiety settled on the back of her neck.

She turned. Their two teammates were loading up on munitions, and Engineer was chatting with Medic. She hefted up her flamethrower and trotted closer. Maybe being around people would distract her from herself, and from all these memories that didn’t feel like hers.

1970.

She should ask someone who wasn’t Engineer what year it was. The idea bowled her over so quickly she didn’t even stop to check herself. Instead she trotted up to Heavy and tapped him on the arm. “Uh—Heavy?”

The huge gunman turned just enough to regard her from the corner of his eye. “Yes?” he rumbled, his voice low as thunder.

Pyro stepped back in the snow, the question caught on her teeth. Then she glanced at Engineer, still talking with Medic by the sentry, not paying attention to them at all. “What, uh. What year is it?”

Heavy’s brow wrinkled with his frown. “Say again?”

“Um,” she said. The ridiculousness of the question caught up with her. “The year. What’s the year?”

“What is ear?”

Dammit. She flexed her fingers around her flamethrower, then popped open the mask’s filter. “Sorry. The year, the, uh, date. What’s today’s date?”

This seemed to baffle Heavy even more than the fact she had spoken to him at all. No—baffle wasn’t the right word. As Pyro watched his expression became outright disturbed, and he stared at her for a long time.

But her answer never came. Eventually Heavy turned his back on her, lifted up his minigun and called, “Doktor, we must go.”

Bewildered and mute, Pyro watched as they left her and Engineer, disappearing into the snow.

 

* * *

 

The day shot by. Pyro stuck close to Engineer, trying to figure out what the hell she was supposed to be doing. Her fighting was shit. The solitary time she managed to down the RED soldier it was sheer luck, chasing after him with her flamethrower screaming its fury as he and his empty rocket launcher bolted for one of the ammo reserves. The flame hardly touched him, but she remembered the axe in her belt when he was just a few yards from his target. One lucky throw later and he was bleeding out in the snow. Almost immediately after, the RED scout came barreling up on her flank and beat her down with his bat. (That’s what Engineer said, anyway. That, and “You can’t be running off on ‘em one-on-one. And you sure as hell ain’t ever gonna beat their scout out in the open like that.”)

On her first trip through respawn she vomited, and on the second and third times, too. It was humiliating, but at least she managed to get her mask up and to the closest trash can. The fourth and fifth times she came out shaky and queasy, and on the sixth she was so off-balance she walked directly into the supplies locker, but at least she’d stopped being sick.  When she trudged back up to the action after her latest reanimation, most of the team had just mounted another charge after driving their enemies off the second RED point. Engineer was packing up to move forward when Scout jogged over. She didn’t pay him much attention—Scout didn’t like her, that was something she remembered—and he did the same. Instead he looked left and right and behind him, and then he—wasn’t Scout.

Pyro shouted, scrambling for her flamethrower. By the time Engineer turned around she had shoved the muzzle nearly flat against the RED spy’s chest. The pilot flame was centimeters off lighting up his peacoat. Her finger trembled on the trigger, but Engineer’s voice stayed her hand. “Whoa, hey now.”

She could barely see him from the edge of her vision, but he crossed the distance between them in three strides. He, too, looked over both shoulders before he addressed the spy. “You’re gonna get all of us in trouble.”

“The way was clear,” the spy said, apparently untroubled. He paid no attention to Pyro. “Would you be so kind as to call off your dog?”

“I’m not a dog,” Pyro barked, thumping the muzzle against his chest. The spy finally looked at her, raising one eyebrow.

“I see you’ve taught her ‘speak’,” he said with a chuckle, pressing the flamethrower to the side with a single finger. “Do accept my apologies, madam. I take it the treatment was a success, then? I have been observing you.”

“It’s alright, Pyro,” Engineer said. It wasn’t alright, it wasn’t fucking alright, but she stepped back and let the nose of her weapon drop. “Observing, huh. Well,” and Engineer paused, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “It did work, just kicked in yesterday night.”

“Delightful.”

“Suppose I owe you some thanks. And some apologies.”

A wry smile cracked the spy’s neutral expression. “Not at all. It was a gift, after all.”

Pyro wet her chapped lips, eyes cutting between the two. Engineer had told her the story, told her how the RED spy had helped, but it hadn’t sunk in.  She had already forgotten it. Why had the spy wanted to help her—why would Engineer accept?

Their conversation continued without her. “Well,” the spy said, pulling back his sleeve to reveal his watch, “I am certainly glad to hear it. I wished only to confirm. Until next time, then.”

“Wait,” Engineer said. His eyes cut toward Pyro, and he paused. “… ah, nah, never mind. Never mind.”

The spy looked him over, and then her, hand poised on his wrist. Then he gave them both a nod and a little smile, and faded out of sight.

 

* * *

  

After that she managed to keep herself alive until the sirens blew again. She trailed Soldier and Sniper back to the base; she had left Engineer when a barrage of rockets and grenades rained down on his nest, fear and instinct getting the better of her. As they walked through the churned snow she kept an eye out for him, but he was nowhere: probably still in respawn.

How could she have forgotten about that, of all things?

She blinked and she was sitting. Time skip. This time she managed to not fall over. Around her the team was slowly getting out of their seats, talking idly and taking dirtied dishes from table to sink—she’d zoned out through dinner.

Engineer had stepped away, and she stood, picking up the bowl of … whatever dinner was. When a hand clapped her hard on the back she almost dropped it. She turned and found Demoman. “Pyro!” he said, grinning. “C’mon, aye, s’been right days since I had time fer yer stories.”

“Stories?”

“Ooh, I got a good one t’night, I do.  Come along!”

Dumbstruck, Pyro looked for Engineer, for some kind of help. Before any could be found, Demo was herding her out of the canteen.

He rambled on and on as they went through the halls, up the stairs and into the bright, cluttered room he (apparently) crafted his bombs in, far from the main complex. Even through her mask she had to pause in the doorway as the smell of whiskey and sulfur hit her.  Inside he gestured to a crate—his workshop was as stuffed with the things as Engineer’s, amid stacks of steel barrels and coiling lengths of wire and fuses—and at a loss for anything else to do, Pyro sat on it, still clutching her bowl.

“There now,” Demo said, rubbing his hands together. “What’dya want hear about tonight?”

Pyro stared at him. Slowly, she shrugged. 

“My choice, eh? Wellll,” Demo continued, leaning back. “Did I ever tell yeh about the water-horse of Poll nan Craobhan?”

“The what?”

Her teammate grinned and leaned forward, settling into his seat in a way that seemed familiar. “Well now. Right ages ago, this was, near a pool and a river, and the pool was haunted by a water-horse—an’ a water-horse, understand, it’s not really a horse …”

Dumbfounded, she listened.

If nothing else, Demo was a great storyteller. His voice changed with every character, and the eponymous water-horse was scary enough, if you were eight. He had gotten to the part where the hero of the tale had captured the monster when Pyro held up her hands. “Look, wait. Why are we doing this?”

Demo paused, eyebrows raising. “Come again, lad?”

“I mean. Do—do we do this a lot?” Try as she might she could not remember more than glimpses of his bomb-shop. She had been here before, she felt sure, but the reason eluded her. “I’ve kind of … I’ve been having trouble remembering some things lately.”

He was squinting at her out of his one good eye, now, visibly baffled. “Y’feelin’ alright there, Pyro?”

“I feel fine—”

“Is it different story yeh be wantin’? I’ve drummed up a fine few new ones ‘bout dragons, if you like.”

“No,” she said, standing. “No, that … th, thanks anyway. I’m—going.”

She could feel Demo’s eye upon her as she made for the door.

Her head spun as she wandered through the base, avoiding the rest of the team. When she had left she had not intended to go anywhere particular, except maybe back to her room. The bowl was still in her hand and the brief break for lunch had only left her hungrier than she had been before she ate.

If she could have gone outside she could have started a fire—but it was too cold and there was nothing she was aware of that would burn well. The wood would all be soaked from the snow. God, she needed to burn something. Anything. Even the base was made all of concrete and vinyl—it wouldn’t light up unless she flooded it with something. Too much effort—and she didn’t really want the base destroyed, she guessed.

But in the end, when she finally stopped walking, she was outside of Engineer’s room. She had never been there before, and there was nothing to indicate who the door belonged to, but—it was Engineer’s room. She touched the handle, checked herself, and knocked. Why not.

Nothing. She swayed back on her heels and tried again.

“Pyro?”

She practically leapt into the air at the voice. Heart still thumping, she turned to look and there was Engineer, peering at her over a cardboard box in his arms. “What’re you doing here?” he asked, raising an eyebrow questioningly. His goggles were nowhere in sight.

“I, um.” She had no idea. “Just … looking around. What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box.

“This? This, it ain’t nothin’,” he said, hefting it under the arm furthest from her as he opened the door. “Just some old junk.”

Junk. They didn’t look like junk. The box was full of color, and a very sharp want grabbed her without warning. As Engineer turned to enter his room, she plucked one of the bright shapes out of the box. “Hey—!”

She stepped back, turning it over in her hand. There was a brief silence. “Kids’ books? Why do you have these?”

“Just uh,” Engineer said, and he looked … cornered. Pyro felt herself bristle. The rest of the team could act ridiculous if they wanted, whatever, but Engineer— “Just, here, it ain’t nothin’.”

He reached to take it back. She pulled away, looking at it more closely.

It was square and small, simple illustrations of smiling animals in a barn covering the front. When she glanced up at Engineer again, the box was tilted toward her. There were more of the same inside. Flipping it open she scanned the pages, her confusion growing with each one. “They’re not even in English.”

“Hold on, what?”

She snapped the book shut and dropped it back into the box. “Why do you have a bunch of—”

“No, say that again—open your filter.”

Slowly, she obliged. “They’re … not in English.”

The way he looked at her set her gut churning. His gaze dropped down to the book, and then moved back to her. It lingered there for a long time before he turned away. “Well,” he said, “I guess—don’t, don’t worry about it.”

“Engineer—”

“Later,” he said, disappearing into his room. The door shut in Pyro’s face with a very final click.


	14. 13: Sankofa

### 13\. san·ko·fa _(Akan)_
    
    
    1. “go back and fetch it”; to look to the past in order to understand the present and move forward.

 

* * *

 

The next day brought a blizzard.

Pyro awoke groggy and still cold despite the mound of blankets, and it took another stint of hunching over her collected lighters to get herself fully functional. By then she felt a little better, at least. When the sirens howled she left the base with the rest of them.

The wind screamed as they ran into it. Pyro couldn’t help but flinch when the thick flakes hammered her lenses, and from the edge of her narrow vision she could see Engineer pause and wipe them from his goggles, too. She took a deep breath and stepped into the snow.

The storm had been raging since before the sun came up, or so Sniper had said. As a result the snow went halfway up her calves, and she found herself using Shark to melt herself a path. The snow slid and sloshed around her boots as she walked, tiny diamond droplets leaping back into the drifts. It was a waste of fuel, but by the time she got up to the fighting probably Engineer would have a dispenser up anyway, and she needed the fire. She needed it.

When the shrieking wind snuffed out the pilot light, and the long ribbon of flame with it, she stopped short. With a harsh exhalation she shook herself and looked around for her team. 

No one was there.

She turned in a full circle, uncertain. Surely she hadn’t gone that far. But the storm whipped the snow up around her, obscuring her vision past a few feet.

It took much too long for her to realize she could simply follow her trail back to where she had started, and from there her team’s tracks in the snow. Right. Yeah. She turned to retrace her melted path.

Somewhere, a voice called out.

Pyro stopped, lifting her head. “Hello?” she called back, realizing in the same moment that she would be impossible to hear over the wind.

The voice came again, still too muted for her to make out. Pyro looked back down the path, and then where the voice had come from—deeper into the storm.

It was probably nothing.

She headed back to the base.

 

* * *

 

“Where’ve you been?” Engineer asked her some twenty minutes later, once she’d finally found the right way toward the fighting.

“Got lost.” He couldn’t hear her, so she kept talking. “I thought I heard someone calling. Because, you know that makes sense, middle of a fucking blizzard.”

Engineer might have blinked at her. She couldn’t tell, same as he couldn’t see her furrowed brow, or the way she gnawed her lip as she refilled the flamethrower’s canister. “Never mind, I guess,” he said. You doin’ alright?” She gave him a thumbs-up. Sure. Yeah. Never better. “Good,” Engineer said, turning.

_BEEP_ .

Pyro flinched badly, even knowing the sound: Engineer’s sentry, locking onto something. She ripped her flamethrower off the dispenser and spun, looking for the RED. There was nothing in the thick flakes.

_BE-BEEP._

The sentry had lost the target. When she glanced at it she saw it dropping back into its monitoring routine, only to immediately lock again. Twice it repeated this, locking in a different place each time. Engineer had put his shotgun to his shoulder, matching the sentry’s line of sight. He moved his head slightly toward her, and with one hand gestured a sort of half-circle in the air. _Circle around._

Well, she didn’t have a better idea.

As quietly as she could, she rounded the rocks by Engineer’s nest. Still couldn’t see for shit, and looking down she found no other tracks. Maybe the RED spy had come calling again?

 _BEEP. BE-BEEP._ Whoever it was, they were using the storm to their advantage.

Pyro pressed forward. If the wind snuffed out her pilot light this time, she was screwed. She had her flare gun, but she doubted she could even aim it in this.

She had not made it three paces before the sentry’s target-lock cut through the wind again, followed by a yell. The shock of it froze her for a heartbeat, and then she ran forward, blind.

Gunfire split the air. All at once the wind died, the snow thinning out, like a curtain parting.

Pyro turned her head in time to see the sentry’s rockets launch with a blaze of fire. In the corner of her vision, something crimson moved. She turned to look in the same moment that the RED pyro hauled up their own flamethrower, pointed square at the rockets. There was a loud, harsh scraping of air and the raging snowflakes all turned at once, surging back toward the sentry—and so did the rockets, diverted by the massive air pressure.

Something whiter than the snow flashed across Pyro’s vision, and flying ice and frozen earth struck her hard enough to bruise. The boom swallowed Engineer’s howl, and the sentry teetered backwards. The RED pyro rushed in as the machine hung precariously on its back leg, driving their shoulder up beneath the frantically twisting gun barrels. The sentry toppled, so did Engineer, and Pyro, frozen, watched as the RED looked from machine to man, both lying motionless in the snow. They made a fist with one hand and jerked their arm down sharply, pumping the air. Victory.

They turned too late to meet her when she charged them, blinkered by their own mask. A muffled yelp rewarded her as she dropped them into the snow. The impact knocked both flamethrowers out of their grasps, and Pyro found herself straddling her double. Her hand was already at her belt before her victim could do more than kick.

The axe leapt to her glove, the iron head flying skyward. The RED looked at her, or seemed to, before turning their face aside and raising its arms, all one instinctive, futile movement.

Pyro hesitated.

_She was in the barracks, in Teufort—_

_—there was something smeared on one of her lenses—_

_—there someone smeared on the floor beneath her._

The axe began to shake.

The RED was still alive.

Suddenly Pyro was gasping on her side on the ground, the axe just out of reach. The straps of her oxygen tank were twisted where the other pyro had grabbed them to throw her off. She shoved herself upright, fumbling for her flare gun only to find it missing. As she began casting about for a weapon, a rock, anything, the RED unholstered their shotgun. All she found was snow, powder above, wet beneath. It sunk into her hands like so much sand.

Pyro stared up at her double with a numb, sinking kind of feeling. The RED put the butt of the gun to their shoulder, and the wind picked up again.

With it came a the blast of a battle horn, howling triumphantly against the storm. The RED looked off toward the sound.

The snow in Pyro’s hand was frigid and heavy.

She hurled the snowball.

It exploded across the RED’s lenses, followed by a muffled yell. Dumbstruck by her own good fortune, Pyro almost forgot to move as the RED reeled, trying to wipe the snow from their mask. The snow six inches from her exploding from a blind shotgun blast was impetus enough to rouse her. On her feet, she rushed.

The struggle was brief. Frozen rubber grips poorly. Tearing the shotgun out of the RED’s hands was easy, and so was pulling the trigger. The shotgun bit a hole the size of a fist through the other pyro’s side, and a ragged shriek rent the air as they fell into the snow.

Her own labored breathing was scratchy and painful inside her mask. Pyro stared down at the RED as they writhed. Blood gushed from the new holes in the suit, and she could see the punctured skin and torn fabric beneath their clutching hand. They would die even if she did nothing. She curled her finger around the trigger again, unsure.

As she watched, the RED’s movements got less frantic. She blinked, glancing at their face, then back to the crimson melting the snow. The blood started moving, slithering through the white, curling until it had spiraled into a perfect peppermint swirl. The RED said, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

“What?!”

Her answer was lost in the boom of the shotgun. She’d startled so badly that she’d fired it again. Another chunk was taken out of the RED’s skull, and it went still. When she looked back at the snow the peppermint swirl remained.

The wind cascaded around her, pulling at her. Pyro watched the corpse for a full twenty seconds before she dared to sling the gun over her shoulder by its strap. Once assured they would not resurrect themselves, she turned to look for her weapons. The flare gun she found not two feet from where the RED had knocked her down. Further off the dark glint of Shark’s black nozzle caught her eye, but as she made for it she almost tripped over something else. Glancing down, she found the RED pyro’s flamethrower.

She looked around, and satisfied she was alone, knelt to pick it up. Her hands were still shaking—she needed the distraction. It was different from hers, which if she thought about it was to be expected, but still caught her off-guard. It was dirty silver and red, and astonishingly lightweight. It had no pilot light, just something resembling a stove element on the end of the nozzle, and when she gave it an experimental puff it breathed out a gorgeous flame. She chanced another look around, then hauled back on the trigger. A tongue of fire bloomed out toward the snow, buffeted by the wind but never snuffed.

The tension seemed to go with the fire, a little. The fuel ran out all too soon. Reverently, she lay it down in the snow, and went to fetch her own.

Shark felt heavy and cumbersome by comparison now, and she found the pilot light had gone out again. It took five minutes’ finagling with a lighter from her ammo pouch to get it going, and by then all traces of the fight—except the trampled snow—had vanished.

 

* * *

 

She got lost again. Or else the fighting had simply moved so far ahead she couldn’t hear it over the howling wind. The snow around her was scuffed and muddied too much for her to try the same trick twice, so. Pyro picked a direction and walked.

It took her about five minutes of walking to figure out she’d picked the wrong one. By then the wind was so bad it was driving itself into every feasible crack her suit had, whistling through her filters, seeping in under her gloves and collar. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, looking around. It was a solid wall of white no matter where she looked.

The shotgun’s weight hung heavy on her side. Worst-case scenario, she guessed she could send herself to respawn. How many times had she done that, since 1968? How many times had she fought the RED pyro? How often had she won? Lost?

When another blast of snow hit her like a wall she stopped in her tracks, burying her face in her arms. It seemed to take forever to stop. The shotgun option was looking better and better. She reached down to touch the thing and her hand bumped the flare gun instead. Of course—she wrapped her hand around it, pointed it skyward, and fired it.

The flare streaked upward with a high scream, and she watched it disappear into the falling snow. No one would see it, but something in her demanded she try—probably the same thing that didn’t want a shotgun anywhere near her face no matter how assured she was of resurrection.

She waited, rubbing her hands together. Nothing, of course, happened.

Pyro turned to try and retrace her steps.

“Wait!”

The voice came clear as crystal. Pyro froze in her tracks, head jerking up. There was no one there when she looked around. It came again, and this time she knew it was the same voice from before. “Wait!”

Something about it made a chill worse than any wind crawl down her spine. She fell back a step, and turned again to flee.

“Wait,” it said a third time, five feet from her.

She cried out in shock, nearly falling straight back on her ass into the snow. Someone was standing there, but the wall of white had gotten too bad for her to see more than their silhouette. “Who?” she started, but couldn’t find the words to follow it.

“Just me,” the voice said.

They were too tall to be Engineer. “Demo …?”

“Nah, nah.” Scout—he sounded like Scout. What was Scout doing out here? “Just I ain’t seen you in a while. Thought I’d say heya.”

“You—you saw me at breakfast.”

He tilted his head a little to one side. “Y’know you’re goin’ the wrong way?”

“Yeah—yeah, I know.” Pyro hefted up her flamethrower and made for what she hoped was the right way, into the wind.

Scout followed her. “Pretty cold.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t never get this cold back home. Gets bad, I mean, but we are way up north.”

“In, uh. In Boston?”

“Yeah, you remember.”

“Why the hell would I—”

(Her yard, in January, patchy with melted snow, drowning the sulfur smell, hiding the burnt grass.)

Pyro swallowed. “It … no. I guess it doesn’t.”

“Yeah, nothin’ like this nohow anyway, ridiculous,” Scout said. She tried to steal another glance at him, but he was a half-pace behind at her side and the lip of her mask’s lens blocked him out.

He said nothing more as they made their way through the snow. It wasn’t like Scout, to walk in silence. The longer he went without speaking the more uncomfortable she became. “Hey,” she said at last, more to break the snow-muted stillness than anything. “Hey, did … did I ask you for something recently?”

“Might’ve. What?”

Pyro chewed her lip. “I don’t remember.”

“That’s a pretty big problem with you.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Someone’s got to.”

For a moment, the wind lulled. If she squinted Pyro could see a building in the distance. “I think I asked you to tell me a story.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did.”

“Do you remember?” Scout said.

The wind began to blow again. It pierced Pyro’s mask and suit to swirl around and inside her, through her teeth, into her ears and eyes and nose. When it left, slipping out of the cracks and gaps like exhaust, it pulled something away with it. She stopped in the snow again, turning to Scout.

 

 

 

It wasn’t Scout, of course. Just someone like him. Pyro looked him up and down and he stood patiently, hands in his letterman jacket’s pockets, waiting. She took a long, slow breath, and let it out as evenly as she could.

“Do you remember?” he asked again.

Pyro turned her face away.


	15. 14: Farpotshket

### 14\. far·pot·shket _(Yiddish)_
    
    
    1. something that is broken specifically because someone else tried to fix it, making it worse.

 

* * *

 

The ghost was right about one thing: the cold was never this bad in Boston. Pyro might as well have been standing in the snow and wind for as warm as it was in the garage. Cold or not, though, she had spent the better part of the evening scavenging out here. It was as good a distraction as any, and the alternative was thinking about the ghost.

He had disappeared as soon as she had tried to look at him again, and moments after that the snow had exploded ten feet from her. The RED soldier came soaring through the air at her, screaming. She whipped her flamethrower around and caught him full in the face with a burst of fire, her body moving before her mind could catch up. His screams went from war-cry to agony when he hit the snow. Pyro watched herself, numb, as she unholstered the stolen shotgun and put him out of his misery in a smooth, single motion. It felt like someone else had done the act.

A loud, pleased chirp shook her from her daze. When she tried to find what had made it she saw nothing but herself and the soldier’s smoldering corpse.

She found her way back to the team after that. The rest of the day flew past. She died enough times that Scout eventually smacked the back of her head on his way out of respawn and muttered something about getting her head in the game, but the siren blew before she was halfway out of the base. Pyro turned tail and trudged off the field, glad it was over.

The thought of food made her gut churn and her mouth taste like ash. Dinner was out. She dragged herself to her room to sit down long enough to ward off the signature respawn nausea, and thought very hard about nothing.

That only worked for so long. Despite herself she pulled off her gloves and gazed down at her palms. The thin white scars still branded her. It was funny; they didn’t look like they had faded at all. That was what she got for forgetting, she guessed.

Nothing else happened. The ghost was not summoned. Pyro exhaled and pulled the gloves back on. As she did her eyes drifted over to where she had dropped her flamethrower next to the door.

It was like seeing it for the first time. The immediate thought that came to her was _ugly_. Even if her scars looked fresh, the two years she could not remember had taken their toll on her machine. Wasn’t respawn supposed to keep it intact somehow? Dents and rust riddled the pipes, and the was tubing patched in some places and duct-taped in others. The propane tank was shiny and white, but the muzzle was dull with chips and scratches. The paint on the gas pump handle was worn down so completely that she could see the black beneath the blue. She scowled at it; she really must have been sick if she’d let it go so long without maintenance.

Her mind dragged her back to a summer in Boston and a burning cabin. Back to a young man asking her questions that, for once, she had been willing to answer.

A dull, sick throb came with the memory. Swallowing, she tore her eyes away.

The RED pyro’s flamethrower popped into her head as she sought a distraction. It put hers to shame as far as form and efficiency went, sleek and shiny. But it could be replicated. She tried picking it apart from what she could remember and marking off things she knew she could make or find—a fire extinguisher tank, a muffler, maybe an exhaust pipe for venting purposes …

She was out the door and halfway to the garage before she even realized she had stood up.

The next hour was the most peaceful one she’d had in recent memory. Her hunch had told her the garage was likely to be full of materials, and she was absolutely correct. Before long she had amassed a hoard: coffee cans filled with old nails and screws, cardboard boxes full of metal scraps and rusting mechanisms, and even a welding torch. God, she had forgotten how soothing building was. It absorbed her so much that she did not even register the sound of the door creaking open some time later.

“Pyro? You in here?”

Pyro paused from where she was trying to pull one of the huge, heavy workbenches away from the wall. Lifting her head, she met Engineer’s baffled stare, waved, and got back to work.

“Hey,” Engineer said, ambling toward her. He stopped by her as she got the massive bench out far enough that she could duck down and feel around for the scrap metal she had managed to drop back there. “Makin’ something?”

“Yeah. New flamethrower.”

“A new one?” Even with two sets of lenses between them Engineer’s bewildered expression was clear as crystal. “A new flamethrower?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

Pyro rubbed at one temple with the heel of her hand, like that was going to clear her head or something. She popped the mask’s filter and said, “The pilot light keeps going out, with the wind, or if I drop it in the snow.”

“Huh. Couldn’t you could just add a—”

“And it’s too heavy, it’s hard enough to move with the suit and the extra clothes.” She backed out from behind the bench and brushed debris off her knees before coming around to look at her collection of junk again. “I’m pretty sure I can make a lighter one. And it’s just, it’s old. It’s—it’s always been a prototype.”

“A prototype.”

“ _Yes._ Give me that thing by your hand.”

“Uh—what, this?” Engineer paused, looking at it. “Pyro, this is a stove element.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me you didn’t just pry this off the stove in the kitchen.”

“No one was using it. And there’s three other ones.”

“You can’t just be going around strippin’ down things folks got a need for like that.”

“I said no one was using it,” she said, glaring at him. The effect had to have been lost with the mask, but Engineer shut up anyway. He just met her, lens for lens, then handed her the element. “Thank you.”

“Where’d you get all this stuff? Besides the stove.” She turned away, pointing toward the back of the garage where two filing cabinets and the gutted remains of an antique radio lay against the wall. “What, just those? All this from those?”

“There’s a door behind them. Scrap room or something.”

“Hell, really?”

“Yes really. Stuff that broke from the cold, I think.”

“I don’t see a door. You just tellin’ me that so I won’t hassle you?”

“Oh my _god_ , please, mother me more, it gets me off.” She turned away, bristling. “Go see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

Engineer was silent at that. He did not go see for himself but instead just stood there for a few minutes more, observing her as she fumbled with her materials. How the hell was she supposed to get anything done like this?

It was a relief when he shoved his hands into his pockets and shivered, taking a step back. He was still in his work uniform, sans coat, and that had to be even colder than her getup. “Well,” he said, finally, “You need help, feel free to give me a holler.”

Pyro just grunted in answer, and didn’t bother watching him go.

 

* * *

 

“Upstairs called,” Sniper said the next morning before anyone else in the kitchen was quite awake. “BLU an’ RED aren’t happy, guess they’re having some discussions. Callin’ a temporary ceasefire.”

Pyro stopped fiddling with her mug of cocoa, glancing first at him and then at the team. They all looked at one another, and on their faces she managed to pick out things like relief, surprise, exhaustion. “Can we go home till it’s called off?” Scout said.

“No, they want us occupying the place.”

“But it’s friggin’ Christmas in a couple’a days, they can’t do that, I ain’t seen my family in forever, Christmas’s the only damn time everyone’s around all at once anymore!”

“You wanna tell ‘em that, go ahead,” Sniper said, and sipped his coffee.

“Aw, for …” Scout trailed off, muttering something—a long stream of somethings—before grabbing his toast and storming out.

With no reason to congregate, the rest of the team followed suit, splitting off into ones and twos. When Pyro trotted over to Engineer, asking if he knew where she could get a straw, she got an earful. “Least they could damn well do is let us go home a while,” he told her while pulling open a drawer and dropping a white straw into her mug. “I am gettin’ tired of this, Pyro, real tired.”

“How long have we been here?”

“Comin’ up on two months. Don’t remember if I said that. Ain’t the longest job we’ve done—that was a three-month one down in Thunder Mountain—but on that one you could at least go outside without worryin’ about if you were gonna have to respawn yourself on account’a frostbite. Hell. It ain’t the waiting around I mind, it’s the cold. The dark.” Pyro didn’t say anything. Engineer sighed, leading her out of the mess. “But it won’t do dwelling on it, I guess.”

For lack of anything better to do, she stuck with him for a few hours after that, watching him beat Spy five chess games in a row. When that got boring, she shut herself into her room and spent a while reacquainting herself with it. Once she’d pulled her suit off, she went through the lighter collection she didn’t remember amassing. It paled in comparison to the veritable museum she’d had in Boston. For the most part it was just a sloppy heap of BiCs with a smattering of Zippos and other brands in varying states of decay, but at least they burned. She organized them by kind and year, lining them up on their sides on the chest. As soon as she was done, she changed her mind and organized them by how much fuel they had left instead. Where the hell could she get some lighter fluid?

Her hands slid off the top of the chest, fingers hooking on the drawer handles. Her eyes followed, picking over the antique. Before now she had avoided the drawers, unsure if she wanted to know what waited inside. If it had more things like the drawings, which still lay in a heap of ash on the ground. But she had to look sooner or later. 

With a grim determination, she yanked open the top drawer and found …

… hats.

She stared down at them, bewildered. Of everything she had prepared herself for, hats were not among them. They were bizarre hats, too—a propeller beanie, a dragon mask, a dented blue tea hat with a yellow ribbon. There was even a fire chief’s helmet that she turned over in her hands for a few seconds before putting on her head for the hell of it. It was too big for her, but the fit would have been perfect with the bulk of her mask.

So that had been anticlimactic. Better than the alternatives, probably. With a heavy exhale she dropped the hat back into the drawer and moved down the next one. In here was a sparse collection of clothes, including an army-green sweater. It was so enormous and the wool was so thick she almost wondered if it had once belonged to Heavy. It was incredibly warm, too, when she pulled it on. She rolled up the sleeves, which were a good four inches too long for her, and kept going, though the only other things in the chest were mothballs and a few more matchbooks, along with some paper and crayons. She chose to pretend she had not seen them.

A book would have been nice. She had hoped to find one squirreled away in there, and a quick overturn of her room proved she didn’t have any hidden anywhere either.

It was going to be a long goddamn ceasefire without anything to read. She would just have to find something.

Armed with her new sweater and a pair of jeans from the same drawer, plus mask but sans gloves, she wandered the base. For the most part she did not encounter the team. What little she did see of them informed her that apparently wearing regular clothing wasn’t something she’d done often in her memory gap. Demo asked her if she’d taken the sweater from a yeti and Sniper stopped her, tutted at the craftsmanship, and said he’d knit her a better one. Everyone else just raised their eyebrows.

Books were scarce. She found one hidden away in the lockers, but when she cracked it open it was in another language. German, she guessed, or more likely Russian—she couldn’t pick out any of the letters. The ragged-looking newspapers sitting on the mess counter were the same story: completely unreadable. She left them, wondering how much Heavy had to pay to get newspapers flown in from Russia.

Eventually she found herself in front of the room Engineer kept his hardware in, the keypad glowing green at her. Engineer would have books, or he had in the past, that much she felt sure of. Maybe he would have some lighter fluid, too. She knocked.

It took the door so long to open that she almost gave up and left before Engineer appeared. He paused, looking her over. “Oh, Pyro. Hey there.” They had a kind of goggle stare-off at each other for a second, then Engineer cleared his throat. “Need something?”

“Do you have any books?” At her words Engineer gave her a strange look, a hard look. She cleared her throat and popped her mask filter. “Uh, that I could borrow? Just, I don’t know, fiction? I’m bored.”

“I might,” he said at last, stepping back to let her in. “Ah, don’t—don’t sit on the crates, I’m doing something with em.” Well, okay. She leaned against the larger of the two benches instead. “Fiction, you said?” he asked, pulling open a flimsy-looking filing cabinet in one corner of the room. “Don’t know if I’ve got much of that here, truth be told. You tried askin’ Demo?”

Pyro felt her face screw up.  _Did I ever tell yeh about the water-horse of Poll nan Craobhan?_ “He didn’t have anything.”

“Huh, figured he’d have whole shelves,” Engineer said, rummaging through the top drawer before squatting down to investigate the second. It rolled open with a painful squeak, and he paused, gazing down into it. He reached in and pulled out a book with a cover so familiar that it made Pyro’s eyes light up. “Forgot this was in here.”

She seized the tattered copy of _Fahrenheit 451_ the moment he held it within reach, the paper soft and comforting in her hands. Engineer slid the drawer shut and she flipped the book open, skimming the pages.

It took her a full ten seconds figure out something wasn’t right. She felt her brow knit as she turned first one page, then another. “What language is this in?”

“What?”

Looking up, she found Engineer peering at her over his shoulder from where he had moved back to his workbench. She gestured to the book. “It’s not in English. Did you get this from Heavy or something? Is it Russian?”

“Not in—let me see that.” She gave it to him, and he scanned the spread she left it open at. Then he looked over the top of it at her, one eyebrow quirked. “This is the exact same one you were reading when Miss Pauling came calling. Remember? I don’t even know where you got it. What are you talkin’ about?”

“No it’s not. It’s not in English, I can’t read it, I don’t know how the hell I can make that any plainer.”

“ ‘There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man.’ ”

Engineer stopped reading, lifting his head. One by one the words faded from Pyro’s ears, leaving a vacuum in their wake.

That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. Pyro grabbed the book back. “I don’t—what the fuck, this isn’t English. I can’t read this. This isn’t English.”

He crossed to stand next to her, and his closeness as he looked at the book with her made her hunch her shoulders. She flipped further through, staring down at the not-words. Engineer stopped her mid-turn, pointing out a scramble of ink. “Try that one.”

“But—”

“Try, that’s all I’m asking. Look, what’s the first letter?”

She tried. The blunt nail of Engineer’s index finger underlined a short jumble of curves and crossbars. The first one had a heavy swoop to it, but it wasn’t from any alphabet she recognized. “How am I supposed to know?”

He watched her, waiting. She looked at the letter again, static fizzling in the back of her brain. Seconds passed, and Engineer said, “That’s a ‘J.’”

She snapped the book shut, letting it drop to the cement as she turned on her heel. “Pyro,” Engineer called. “Pyro, now, just hold up!”

Pyro did not hold up. Pyro crossed to the filing cabinet the book had come from, tearing it open. Sure enough—more books. She seized the first one and flung it open to a random page.

Nothing.

With a snarl she dropped it and grabbed another. Inside it she found diagrams and more unintelligible words. It joined the first book, and by then Engineer was pulling her away, saying shit she barely heard and didn’t care about anyway. “Pyro,” he said again, urgent, and that was when she ripped herself out of his grasp and stumbled toward the door.

She wrapped her bare hand around the cold handle. Her nails scraped against the smooth metal. Then she just sort of. Stopped. Froze. All the air rushed out of her and she sagged forward, forehead hitting the door.

Everything was quiet.

Her whole body moved like lead as she turned around, her own weight dragging her back to slump against the door. Engineer stood where she had left him, the book now in his hands. She stared at it, at the familiar white-and-red cover and the block-letter words. Her feet pulled her forward before she could think about it, and then she was holding the book again. “I can’t read?” she said, and even to herself she sounded far away. “I can’t read anymore?”

Something was on her shoulder. Engineer had put his hand there, warm and heavy. “I’m sorry,” Engineer said quietly. “I didn’t have any idea anything like this was going to happen.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know.”

Neither one of them said anything more. His hand remained where it was, making her skin crawl, but she couldn’t bring herself to push him off.

“I’ll see if I can’t ask the spy about this,” Engineer said after a while. “Maybe it’s just a matter of you having to learn how again. Okay? Just … don’t panic. You’ll be alright. Hear me?” He squeezed her shoulder before finally letting go, taking at least some of the crawling sensation with him. “You’ll be alright.”

She didn’t feel alright as she slipped back into the hall, too rattled to stay. The base, huge and empty, seemed to watch her as she made her way through it, looking for a distraction. The team seemed to all be off doing their own things—the common room was deserted and so was the garage.

The mess, though, was occupied.

Medic and Heavy were sitting at the table, playing cards and drinking. Pyro watched them from the doorway for a while. The sight felt familiar. Hadn’t they been doing exactly this the first time she met them?

They didn’t notice her, and she stayed there for a long time, steadying her breathing. Eventually her eyes wandered to the fridge. Her stomach twisted—she hadn’t had anything to eat since the hot chocolate from that morning. As casually as possible she sidled inside, pretending not to see them. Heavy looked up, but she couldn’t catch his expression without turning her head.

Medic must have noticed her, too. While she was squinting into the recesses of the fridge, abruptly ravenous but lacking an appetite, he leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Ah, and here we see the wild Pyro having at long last assumed its winter coat! But, really, I feel green is not your color.”

What. Oh. She glanced down at her engulfing sweater, then shut the fridge to turn to them, a wedge of cheese in her hand. Nothing clever to answer with came to mind—she just shrugged. Brilliant. At some point she had snapped her mask filter back together again anyway.

Her eyes darted to Heavy again. His attention was set on his cards. He lay two down between their decks, then shifted in his seat as Medic returned his focus to him. Medic drew a card from one of the decks and put down three more, hesitated with a fourth in his hand, then shook his head, apparently passing the turn.

Well, it wasn’t like she had somewhere to be. And she could use the distraction. Pyro crossed the tiles to lean on the table, looking down at the cards like she had an opinion on them. The numbers and stylized faces looked back. Six of spades, two of hearts, seven of hearts—she could read the numbers. So that was good. That was actually really good. “What’re you playing?”

“A game for grown-ups, Pyro. Do not touch.”

“… I … wasn’t going to. Tell me the rules.”

 

 

Now they were both looking at her. She drummed her fingers on the table, waiting. Medic reached up and adjusted his pince-nez. “Could you repeat that?”

Slowly and deliberately, she snapped the mask filter open. “Tell me the fucking rules, Medic,” she said, biting off each word.

Nothing from either of them. The air seemed to go sour. She was about to cut her losses and leave when Heavy gestured to one of the card stacks in front of him. “It is called zank-patience,” he said. “It is a little like solitaire.” He glanced at her, something guarded and careful in his eyes. “You know solitaire?”

“Um,” she said. The name was familiar, faintly. It seemed like something she’d learned about as a kid. Maybe one of the nuns or caretakers she had known as a child used to play it, but she had no idea how it worked. “Yeah.”

“It is game for two people. Each one has their own deck of cards. To win—”

There was a crash behind her. Pyro whipped around, gripping the table to steady herself. The cards on the table went flying with her motion. Medic gave a sharp sigh.

At the far end of the mess was Scout, ankle-deep in trash. “What on earth are you doing?” asked Medic.

Scout kicked a molding lump of something out of the way, squatting down to rifle through the refuse. “Shut up, look, anyone seen my tags? I had ‘em yesterday, I thought they got tangled up in my coat when I took it off but they ain’t there, shit.”

“Oh, those.” From the corner of her lens Pyro saw Medic roll his eyes. “If I recall correctly you were blown to pieces more than once yesterday. Did you even respawn with them?”

“What, no, man, no way, I swear I had ‘em, they ain’t in the damn snow, don’t give me that. Freakin’—” Finding nothing, he grabbed a huge handful of garbage off the ground and stuffed it back into the bin, mouth running just below hearing level the whole time. When he turned around he barely spared the three of them a glance, but his eyes lingered on Pyro, or so she thought. A familiar dread washed over her.

Then he was off again, trying to pulling the fridge away from the wall. “Yo, Heavy, big man, gimme a hand here!”

The hair on the back of her neck had stood up, what little hadn’t been burned away years ago. With Scout’s back turned, she double-checked her pockets. Lighters, pebbles, lint. No dog tags.

Thank God.

Quick as she could, she slunk out of the room, more memories she had not wanted back lapping at her heels.


	16. 15: Uitwaaien

### 15\. uit·waa·ien  _(Dutch)_
    
    
    1. to take a break to clear one’s head; lit. ‘to walk in the wind.’

 

* * *

 

The crayon fell out of her hand for the third time. Pyro swore and slid off the mattress to fetch it out from under her bed again.

This time it had bounced all the way to the back of the wall. For a second or two she glared at it, then inched her way beneath the frame to pull it out. One bruised chin and muffled stream of cursing later she had it back in hand.

Where had the damn paper gone? She shifted her weight and felt it crunch under her. With a sigh she grabbed the crinkled sheet and smoothed it out on her leg, studying it.

Blank white stared back. The margins were filled with idle purple scratches and number sequences, and a mini-diagram of her new flamethrower plans filled out the bottom-right, but the bulk of it was empty.

Remembering the alphabet was not going well.

She had been at this for an hour. Since she woke up, really. The night previous she had scoured her room for any sign of Scout’s tags, and when she found nothing she burned through five of her lighters until sleep claimed her. She couldn’t remember waking up or starting on the paper, but here she was anyway.

Exhaling, she flipped the paper over. A handful of shaky glyphs met her gaze. Letters—they had to be letters because she had copied them off the faded ink printed onto her mask, though hell if she could tell what they spelled out. Beneath them were a handful of scratched-out attempts at other words.

Screw it. She crumpled up the paper and pitched it across the room, where it bounced off the wall and came to a wobbly stop. For good measure she tossed the crayon at it—it snapped in two—before stalking out of her room. A few seconds later she came back and grabbed the wadded ball, stuffing it into her pocket.

Outside, snow fell.

When Engineer did not answer either his door or the workshop’s, Pyro trudged off toward the common room. There she found Spy and Sniper, the former absorbed in a book and the latter knitting. He hadn’t been kidding about that, apparently. Neither one looked up as she came in, but Sniper said, “Mornin’, Ashes.”

Was she Ashes? Had to be. Shoving her hands into her pockets, she trotted over to him. As she did, he tilted his head up enough to eye her. “Still wearing that thing?”

“It’s cold. It’s better than my suit.”

“You don’t say?” The needles clacked. “I don’t suppose you’d wear a new one even if I made it, wouldja?”

“I guess I would? Why wouldn’t I?” But Sniper didn’t answer, and she didn’t feel like repeating herself. Instead, as clearly as she could: “Where’s Engineer?”

“Hm?”

“ _Engineer?_ ”

“Truckie? Don’t rightly know.” _Truckie_. Evidently Sniper gave everyone stupid nicknames.

“He is in the garage,” Spy said, turning a page. “Trying to fix that scrapheap of yours, I believe, Sniper.”

“Ah,” Sniper said, and then both were silent again. Pyro left.

She met no one else on the way to the garage. A burst of cold welcomed her as she opened the door. Grimacing and suppressing a shudder, she stepped over the threshold.

As soon as she did the roar of an engine filled the air, followed by a triumphant laugh. She froze with her fingers on the door handle, and watched Engineer come around and slam the hood of the big truck with the camper-back down over the purring motor. “About damn time!”

She stepped into the cold, pulling the door closed behind her. Engineer had crouched to examine the tires by the time she got to him. For a second or two she watched him. Then she cracked the mask filter and said, “Was it broken?”

“Wh—oh,” he said, twisting to look up at her. His hardhat and goggles were missing. There was something unfamiliar in his face. Satisfaction. “Oh, hey. Yeah—Sniper brought it on up with him an’ the thing quit working about immediately. The cold, I figure. Been on my case about fixing it. I ain’t no mechanic, but I finally got her done.”

“Why’d he bring it?”

Engineer shook his head. “Why’s Sniper do anything? I can’t make heads nor tails of that man. How’s, ah. How’re you?”

She shrugged, and dug out the paper from her pocket to hand it to him. Taking it, he turned it upside down and backwards for an uncomfortable length of time before he spoke. “Got somethin’ here. ‘Optical mask,’ “ he read. “Guess you copied that?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t guess you knew what it said.”

“No.”

Engineer sighed and put the paper down on the hood of the car. “Dandy. And I ain’t got a clue when I’m going to get to talk to that spy again with this ceasefire on. Sorry fool probably don’t know nothin’, neither. Wish I could talk to their engineer, their damn medic, even. Might be more help than ours.”

Something in his voice went flinty when he said that. Pyro waited a moment, not sure what else to do. Small talk was not exactly her forte, and she hadn’t had much of a plan beyond giving Engineer the paper. “So yesterday,” she ventured at last, “you said I could maybe just … learn to read again?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said, going around and turning off the truck. The engine died with a soft rumble, and left the air utterly silent except for the gentle whistle of the wind outside. “I mean, well. I don’t know too much about this sort of thing, to be straight with you.”

“Could, uh. Could you try to teach me?”

The long pause before he answered made her stomach twist. “I can try, I reckon. Yeah,” he said with a steady inhale of breath, “yeah, alright. But I ain’t no teacher. Probably won’t be any good at it. It’ll have to wait, though,” he said, digging something out of his back pocket. Paper—as he unfolded it, it revealed itself to be a map. “Now I got this damn thing runnin’ again, there’s a town a couple miles off if the maps they gave us ain’t lying. I don’t know about you, but I’m real sick of oatmeal and potatoes. Should be fine to try this reading thing after that. Okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Say, you wanna come?”

 

* * *

 

The town of Miut did not stand; it huddled. The buildings all leaned in toward each other, as if seeking shelter from the frost. Even the radio tower standing high above the other structures looked like it was cold. The mere sight made Pyro shiver, and she was wearing her sweater under her suit, in the heated cab of the truck.

Sniper took a right and the town disappeared, swallowed by evergreens. The sun glanced off the snow on their branches, hurting Pyro’s eyes as the truck rolled slowly down the mountain Coldfront was situated on. Blinking, she sunk back as close to the edge of the cab as she could.

Next to her, Soldier sat bolt upright at perfect attention, as he had since Sniper started the engine. On the other end of the truck’s cramped back seat, Scout lurched forward to stick his head in between Sniper and Engineer up front. “Hey are we there yet? We been drivin’ like an hour, my ass hurts an’ my legs are crampin’ here an’ Soldier smells like cigars. What’s the deal?”

“Sit down, runt, we haven’t even been gone thirty minutes. And the ‘deal’ is I’m not fond of this road.”

“What, you afraid’a a little ice? Big bad Sniper?”

“At a thirty-five-degree angle down frozen dirt? Yes. This thing doesn’t exactly have any bloody snow tires.”

Scout snorted and settled back into his seat, rubbing at his arms. “Shouldn’t be more than another ten minutes or so by now, I think,” Engineer said, head bent over the map he had brandished at Pyro earlier. “We get down this last leg and then it’s a straight shot.”

“ENGINEER! Do we have confidence that this is an American township?”

“ _Yes_ , Soldier.”

“EXCELLENT!”

Engineer had it about right. Once they took the last curve down the incline the road opened out into a snow-choked path, the road barely visible as a gently winding darkness beneath it. They only slid once, on the last turn into the town, and narrowly missed a telephone pole. Once they made it into an actual street, broad and quiet, Sniper parked the truck alongside the curb and they all climbed out.

 

Amid initial shivers and stretching of limbs, Pyro investigated their surroundings. Up close, Miut actually seemed to be alive. A few pedestrians had stopped to watch them—strange cars were probably unusual. A handful of red-and-white signs on shop doors glinted in the winter sunlight, and the light noise of a waking town filled the air. “So where’s the dog sleds an’ snowshoes an’ that crap?” Scout said, pulling his hat further down over his ears.

Sniper snorted. “Ask Jack London.”

“Who? Wait, the guy what wrote all them dog books, right, my sister’s read some’a those, does he live here?”

“Yeah, probably. You should go look for him.”

“Well,” Engineer cut in, “I’m gonna go see if I can’t find some real food ‘round here. If we got to spend Christmas in this mess we might as well make the most of it. Hey—Pyro, why don’t you see if you can’t find some decorations or something?”

Pyro blinked, straightening up. All three of them were looking at her, now—Soldier was already some ways down the street, and appeared to be interrogating someone. “Uh,” she started, “sure, okay.”

“That a good idea, mate?” Pyro’s gaze cut to Sniper as he addressed Engineer. “Lettin’ him off on his own like that?”

_What?_

Before she could raise her voice, Engineer swatted Sniper’s shoulder with the back of his hand, the picture of nonchalance. “He’ll be fine,” he said loudly, and then to Pyro: “Just don’t go setting any fires, hear?”

She did not take her narrowed eyes off Sniper. “Uh-huh.”

An agreement was made to meet back at the truck in an hour or so. Scout sprinted off up one street, Sniper loped down another, and with Soldier gone that left Pyro with Engineer. “What the hell was that?” she said the second Sniper was out of earshot. “ ‘A good idea’? What the hell does that mean? I’m not some—and I don’t just go around setting fire to things.” Not anymore, at least.

Engineer blinked at her. “You are goin’ way too fast. Was that about Sniper?” Teeth grit, she nodded. “Ah. That’s.” He looked back over his shoulder toward the street where their teammate had gone. “Look, you were sick for a long time, remember?” he said, turning back to her and raising his hands helplessly. “You didn’t always … act quite right, they ain’t used to you doing things on your own much. They just gotta get used to the change, you gotta give ‘em time.” Pyro glared. “C’mon, don’t be like that. Go find them decorations. I think they’ll make that whole ice pit a little friendlier. Candy canes, that sorta thing. Have fun with it. Christmas is in two days.”

With that they departed. Pyro picked a direction at random and trudged forward. Decorations. Sure.

Something about his words dug at her, almost more than Sniper’s. Get used to her. Not doing things on her own. Sick. How sick?

“PYRO!”

Something clamped onto her arm. She yelled, jerking back and grabbing for where her axe usually hung only to find nothing.

Just as well. Soldier was beaming six inches from her face, still hanging onto her. “I have fantastic news!”

“Okay?”

“We are in Alaska!”

Pyro leaned back. When she did nothing else, Soldier’s face went through an interesting series of expressions: bafflement, suspicion, and finally, realization.

“Wait, you probably don’t know what states are. We are _still in America!_ I know what Engineer said, but,” and he leaned in enough that she could smell the cigar reek clear through her mask, “there is always the risk that he cannot be trusted! He could have been replaced by a robot double at any time! A _Canadian_ robot double!”

“I know what states are.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Let go.” She tugged her arm free and stepped away, shaking it out. He had a grip like a snapping turtle. “God. _Yes._ And I think we would be able to tell if Engineer was a robot.”

“Ha! That’s what you think. Never underestimate a Canadian, son.” Soldier put his hands on his hips and looked around, scowling. How did he see anything from under the helmet? “All right,” he said. “I’ve got it. Come on, Pyro, we’ve got work to do!”

Before she could protest he grabbed her by the shoulder strap and hauled her into the nearest building. They were barely through the door before Soldier halted again, throwing a pointed finger into the air in urgency. Pyro slammed into his back as he stopped, though for all he moved he might as well have been a tree. “WE ARE IN NEED OF A ROOSTER IMMEDIATELY!”

Everyone in the store—an older man near a huge brass cash register, two young women by a display of hats and scarves, and a massive gray-and-white dog lying on the floor by one of the broad show windows—stopped whatever they were doing to gawk. “A very angry chicken would also be acceptable,” Soldier added thoughtfully, lowering his hand to rub his chin instead. “As long as it has blood on its mind.”

Pyro extricated herself from his grip and got the hell away as Soldier marched toward the shopkeeper. Her heel hit something—turning, she saw she had backed into a small Christmas tree, hung with shiny round ornaments and tinsel. Around her stood a little selection of more of the same—strings of tiny lights and even what looked like a hand-knit tree skirt.

Well. That had been easy.

She left it, for the moment, to survey the rest of the store. It was a good-sized building, with a vaulted ceiling and wood-paneled walls. Shoulder-high aisles of shelves stuffed with a wealth of merchandise stood in neat rows. A moose head was mounted over the checkout desk, where Soldier looked like he was about twenty seconds off putting the clerk in a choke-hold. It wasn’t what she had expected of a town in the middle of a frozen wasteland, though on the way over Engineer had mentioned Miut had its own airport, and was a kind of trading post or something. She hadn’t caught the details, but the extensive selection of goods made sense if that was the case.

How long had it been since she could remember being in a store? The question followed her as she picked her way through the aisles. Before she had met Engineer, at the very least. Her recollection of her life after Boston and before BLU was hazy, but she had a kind of half-memory of stealing duct tape from somewhere just before setting the stadium on fire.

The stadium. She paused with her hands bunched in a bundle of fur. She had burned down an entire hockey stadium, that was right. If she closed her eyes she could almost relive it, the flying ash and the blistering heat. A shudder ran down her spine. Her fingers itched.

“Excuse me?”

Pyro yanked her hands away from the fur, nearly pulling it off the shelf with how hard she jumped. The pair of young women had come up on her without her even noticing. One of them tittered. “You scared him!”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” said the other, who had dark hair and skin and a scarf that stood out brilliantly against them. “We were just wondering—are you one of those mercenaries from up the mountain?”

Oh God. What was she supposed to say? Holy shit, when was the last time she had even been spoken to by someone not on the team? Pyro fidgeted with one of her shoulder straps for a few seconds before giving up and just nodding. “Told you,” whispered the other one, who had a lighter complexion and a faint collection of freckles.

The one with the scarf one waved her off. “Is, uh.” She cast a sidelong glance toward Soldier. “He’s not one too, is he?”

Pyro followed her gaze. Soldier now appeared to be in an intense debate with the old man. An open box of cigars sat on the counter between them, along with a live chicken, a coon-skin cap, and a handful of oversized keys. She nodded again.

“Wow,” said the other girl. “How many of you are there?”

“Uh …” Herself, Engineer, Demo … “Nine.” She held up as many fingers as she said it. The giggling began again. After a few seconds of it, Pyro turned back to the shelves.

“Wait, can we help you find anything?” The one with the scarf touched her arm. “This is my granddad’s store. I’m Miki, by the way. This is Elizabeth.” She held out her hand, smiling. Pyro looked at it, but did not take it. After a few seconds, Miki let it drop. “Uh, what’s your name?”

“Pyro,” Pyro said after a moment’s hesitation, unlatching the filter. “You don’t have any lighter fluid, do you? Or a fire extinguisher?”

Both the girls seemed taken aback, though whether from her answer or something else Pyro wasn’t sure. Miki recovered first. “I know we have lighter fluid,” she said, glancing toward the back of the store. “I’m not sure about a fire extinguisher. Hang on, I’ll check.” Off she went, leaving Pyro and Elizabeth alone.

The uncomfortable silence did not last. “So you guys have been up there for a pretty long time, haven’t you?” Elizabeth asked, eyes bright.

“Um, yeah. A few months.”

“What are you doing up there? I mean, everyone says you’re mercenaries, so …”

Absolutely no good answer came to mind. Was she even supposed to be talking about her job? It seemed like she had signed a dozen different non-disclosure agreements all that time ago, but she couldn’t remember what any of them had said. “It’s sort of secret,” she said eventually. “Not supposed to say anything.”

“Oh, alright,” Elizabeth said. “Your name isn’t really just Pyro, is it?—gosh, I’m asking all these questions. Not a lot happens up here in the winter.”

Pyro shrugged. Again. “That guy’s called Soldier,” she said, nodding toward her teammate. (He was wearing the coon-skin hat now, shaking the clerk’s hand vigorously, a lit cigar in his mouth. The keys stuck out of his pockets and the chicken was tucked under his arm. The chicken also had a cigar in its mouth.)“I work with some people named Engineer and Sniper, too. Part of the job.”

“That’s crazy,” Elizabeth said admiringly.

“You have no idea.”

Just then Miki returned, a canister of lighter fluid in hand. Pyro took it as it was held out to her. “I didn’t see a fire extinguisher,” Miki said. “I can ask granddad when he’s done with your friend if you’d like. We have some other, uh, fire sort of things if you want to look?”

Pyro tripped over herself trying to say yes. She and Elizabeth followed Miki as she weaved through the aisles. The gray dog by the window joined them, nosing its way between them with its tongue lolling. The dog’s head easily came up to her hips, and had it wanted to it could have easily slung its forepaws over her shoulders. It walked stiffly, and its muzzle was dusted with white. “This is Drake,” Elizabeth said, rubbing it between the ears. “He’s been around longer than I have.” When Pyro outstretched her hand, it sniffed her glove, then licked it.

They passed the cash register as they went, and Soldier, who was beaming. “Hello, Pyro! I have recruited the chicken! The operation is proceeding exactly as planned! Say hello to Pyro, private.”

The chicken, a white hen and with the cigar still sticking out of its beak, said nothing.

“Ah, she’s been through too much already, this one,” Soldier said, stroking the bird’s neck with an air of gravity. “Don’t take it so personally, Pyro. Well, I am leaving now. Civilians,” and he glared out at the two women from under his helmet, “you saw nothing.”

He gave them a rigid salute before parading out of the store. “Wow,” said Miki. “Is he always—?”

“Every single day,” said Pyro.

Once recovered, the three of them made their way to the back. Miki lead them through a squat, wide door into a squatter, wider room that was shot through with sunlight courtesy of the windows at the back. Stacked against the three walls before them was an absolute mountain of firewood, set in cleanly divided cords atop a floor strewn with old hay, and dust motes hung in the air.

All this was set well away from the shelves that sat against the wall with the door, which Miki turned to as they all stepped inside. “Here it is,” she said. “It’s not a whole lot, most people just stick to firewood, so we don’t order much else.”

Pyro looked it over, tapping her foot. It was a scant selection to be sure, but then again there wasn’t an awful lot you needed to take proper care of a fire. There was a single smoke detector, more canisters of lighter fluid, a few bags of charcoal. She stepped back to get a better look at the higher shelves. At the top was a series of bright boxes lined up haphazardly together, well out of the way of everything else. In particular an ultramarine one nearest the end caught her eye. It looked familiar. Pyro pointed to it. “Can I see that?”

Miki’s gaze followed her hand. “Sure, let me go get the stepladder.”

 

* * *

 

Pyro was the last one back to the truck. She had lost track of time in the store. Even in the face of her stunted social skills, Miki and Elizabeth seemed delighted to talk to her. Maybe it had something to do with growing up in such a remote place. Either way, making up answers to their questions hadn’t been a bad way to spend the afternoon. And Drake had put his head in her lap when she sat down, and he was so old and peaceful-looking that she hadn’t really wanted to get back up. Making the purchases had been interesting, too; she got to the counter and realized she had no money on her whatsoever. But the old clerk looked her over and raised his eyebrow and said, “You gonna challenge me to a fight to the death, too, or shall I just put it on the tab?” She went with the tab.

So around an hour and a half later she waved goodbye to the girls, scratched Drake behind the ear, and started hauling her box of purchases toward Sniper’s camper. Everyone, even Engineer, looked surprised when she reached them. She looked from face to face, dropped the box, and reached in. Her hand came back full of candy canes and garlands. “Happy?”

Engineer smirked and turned toward the truck. She just caught his soft, sing-song, “Told you,” as he passed Sniper.

Everyone else had bought things, too, and Pyro saw the bulk of it as they loaded them into the back of the camper. Sniper and Engineer had both obtained ridiculous amounts of food among other sundries, and Scout had gotten his hands on his own crate, though it was smaller than hers and full of something that clinked. “Eggnog!” he said, chest puffed out. “The real thing, too, you can’t have Christmas without no eggnog, this stuff’d knock out a horse.” Soldier put nothing in the camper. He also refused to relinquish his chicken, which had lost the cigar, but now sported a tiny helmet almost identical to the one Soldier wore. He held the bird on his lap the entire way back to the base, talking to it in conspiratorial whispers.

“What all’d you get?” Engineer asked her on their way back in, an hour or so later. He said it loud enough for the other mercenaries to hear, right as they were passing the kitchen, and it caught Pyro by surprise. Suddenly everyone was looking at her, though a moment later Scout snorted and trotted ahead of them.

“Just, uh.” She couldn’t really shrug with the crate in her arms, but she tried anyway. It sort of worked. “I don’t know, just whatever they had in the store. Lights and things.”

“Bring it in here, let’s see.” He ushered her into the kitchen before she could protest. All right, fine. The rest of the team that was present—Demoman, Spy, and Scout, having just finished loading his eggnog into the fridge—watched as she set the box down on one of the chairs and slid off the lid. Out came silver tinsel, boxes of little glass ornaments, even a fresh, green wreath beset with pine cones and ribbons. Pyro grabbed a handful of candy canes to stuff into her ammo pouch as Engineer picked up the wreath. “Well, wouldja look at that,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “Don’t really get these back in Texas, do we? Real nice. Anything else? Say, that ain’t a newspaper in there, is it?”

Pyro snapped the lid back into place. “No.”

A few minutes later, once she had escaped the team and left them with the decorations, she shouldered open the door to her room. In seconds she had locked it again and dropped the crate onto her bed to dig through it in privacy.Later she would go and hold Engineer to his promise of trying to make her literate again, but for now the need to take advantage of her new purchases consumed her.

Her gloved fingers pushed aside boxes upon boxes that had been hidden beneath the newspaper, tossing them here and there until her hand closed around the one she wanted. The cardboard ripped open with ease, and Pyro shook out a cigarette. She admired it for about half a second before the nicotine hunger kicked in. It wasn’t as brutal as she remembered the cravings being. Maybe she had stopped smoking before she regained her memory.

She grabbed the least offensive of her remaining lighters, kicked off her boots and dropped onto the bed. A few seconds later the Newport was glowing under her fingers and she breathed it in, letting the smoke deep into her lungs. Her room was still viciously cold, despite her having patched up the window as best as she could, but the smoke was warm and good and took her to places that weren’t here. Here, where she was stuck in Alaska in midwinter and could no longer read, and had apparently been “sick.”

But then, she mused as she let the smoke trail from her mouth, if she hadn’t joined BLU, she would probably be dead. Engineer had nearly shot her as it was. She still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t.

Once the straight had burned down to the butt, she flicked it off into the corner and shook herself. A light-headedness had followed the smoke into her, and she dimly recalled being fifteen and feeling the same thing for the first time. Sick-Pyro had definitely had quit smoking. That was going to change.

She dropped the Newport carton onto her bedside table for future use and leaned back into the crate, surveying her loot. It was not what she had expected to find, and looking at what she had bought made her feel a little sick, but leaving without them had felt gut-wrenchingly wrong.

Well. She didn’t have to worry about them right now. Instead she dug out some of the stolen candy canes. Bright, enticing—the sugar craving was almost as bad as the nicotine. She crunched into one and let the peppermint scare off the taste of tar and tobacco, thinking.

Christmas was in two days, huh. That might not be so bad.


	17. 16: Nepenthe

### 16\. ne·pen·the  _(English)_
    
    
    1. a drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble.  
    
    2. anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, esp. of sorrow or trouble.

 

* * *

 

Two days passed. Pyro worked on her new flamethrower and halfway through the cigarette carton. Both went smoothly, more or less. More smoothly than Engineer’s English lessons, anyway.

“You ain’t even given it time,” Engineer said that afternoon, catching the pen she had just slammed down before it rolled off the workbench. “Don’t nobody learn to read in two days.”

Pyro rolled her eyes. It was a useless gesture under the mask, but it made her feel better. As a more concrete display she got up from the crate she had been using as a seat. “Whatever, but we’ve been doing this all morning. I can’t concentrate anymore. I’m done.”

“We’ve got the time right now, Smoky.” She had to admit it was eerie how well he understood her even with the mask shut. Engineer sighed and looked over the set of glyphs he had drawn out for her in block letters. Over the last several hours she had managed to re-learn a handful of them, though putting them together into anything resembling words had been an exercise in futility. It was anyone’s guess if she’d retain the knowledge. “Once the ceasefire’s over it’s gonna be right back to nine-to-fives and I don’t figure either one of us is going to have the energy for much of this after that.”

“I don’t have the energy now.”

Engineer gave her an exasperated look. Pyro ignored it and left.

The worst part of it was knowing that she had once been able to read, she thought, shoving her thumbs into her suit’s belt as she wandered the hallways. Not just read, but read well, and quickly. She devoured whole libraries, growing up. That was what made her feel stupid. She was a lot of things, but an idiot wasn’t one of them. The hope that all that knowledge would just come flooding back to her kept her dragging her feet against learning it all over. All those other things she hadn’t wanted back had done that. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair—her sudden illiteracy, her faulty mind, whatever the dispenser had done to her. Not fair.

She rounded the corner into the canteen and had to catch the door frame to keep herself from walking into Demo. “Ah—oh, wee dragon!” he said, lifting his arms to keep the plates he was carrying clear of harm. “Merry Christmas!”

“Uh.” Right, Christmas. “You too.”

“C’mon now, don’t lay about, go an’ help carry, aye?” He patted her shoulder awkwardly, then edged past, taking a right down the hall toward where the common area was.

Christmas. She’d forgotten already. Pyro watched him go—he had something green and red hanging around his neck—then looked into the canteen.

Sniper, Spy, and Scout were all there, and, near as Pyro could tell, the latter two were arguing. “Wine, wine, really? Y’don’t drink stinkin’ wine at Christmas, ya drink eggnog. Egg. Nog.”

“I for one do not relish the idea of drinking raw eggs,” said Spy. “If you insist, Scout, you may have my portion.”

“Aw c’mon, fancypants, you eat freakin’ snails an’ crap an’ you’re too good for eggnog? Unbelievable. Fine, yeah, I’ll take yours, more for me, keep yer wine, lame.”

Spy turned. He held under his arm two wine bottles, dark and gleaming. Behind him Sniper grabbed three glass Mason jars filled with something frothing and butter-yellow—the eggnog, probably. Scout stayed behind, hunched over the counter and muttering to himself. “It’s not really raw eggs, is it?” Pyro asked as the two of them as they came toward her.

Spy looked her over before moving on. Sniper, on the other hand, stopped. “What’s that?”

She glanced over at Scout and decided against opening the filter. “Raw eggs?” she said, gesturing to the jars.

“Oh, this’s eggnog. Ever had eggnog? S’eggs an’ milk. Nutmeg, too. Christmas tradition, an’ all, I expect Engie’s told you.”

He held one out to her. For lack of a better alternative, and with Scout now approaching—balancing no fewer than five plates on his arms, each strewn with Oreos, pretzels, and what might have been fruitcake—she took the jar from Sniper’s outstretched hand. The glass was so cold she could feel it through her gloves. “Not really. Thanks.”

She tailed Sniper as he followed the same path as Spy and Demo, and soon found herself in the common room. The first thing to catch her eye was the tree. Someone had cut down one of the evergreens that surrounded the base and it stood in the center of everything, nearly touching the ceiling. It was decked out in the garlands and lights she had bought—Engineer had come calling for them yesterday. Medic and Heavy were just starting to hook ornaments onto it. No candy canes. She had wound up eating the whole box.

The rest of the room was in a similar state. Huge boughs of evergreen tied with twine were strewn over the fireplace’s mantlepiece, and the wreath was centered above that. Some of the other lights had found their way over the windows, and they twinkled even in the afternoon sunlight. She had never been to anything like it.

“Hey, move it, moron.” Scout elbowed past her, barely sparing her a glance. She watched as he slid everything he was carrying onto the folding table someone had set up in the corner of the room, amid badly mismatched candles of differing heights and more, smaller evergreen branches.

So this was the Christmas party. The last Christmas she remembered stuck out in her memory only because it had snowed so badly the night before that the shelter she had been bumming off of had shut down despite intending to stay open for the holiday. She couldn’t remember if that was before or after she had moved to Boston. Pyro exhaled and examined the bottle Sniper had given her again.

Raw eggs, huh. She’d eaten worse. Slipping back to the now-empty canteen, she rummaged around for a straw a few minutes and found a whole pack of them, with letters she couldn’t read scrawled in permanent marker on the front. She grabbed one, opened the bottle to stick it inside, popped her mask filter, and took a sip.

A shock of cold flooded her mouth, first. It was overpowered by an intense sweetness. It was thick, heavy, and made her think of half-melted ice cream, with a hint of spice and vanilla. There was something else, too, something sharp, but it was buried deep under the rest. She swallowed, waited a moment to process the aftertaste, and then turned her back to the doorway to pull up her mask and take a huge gulp straight from the jar. It burned her throat as it went down.

A fourth of the bottle was gone when she finally pulled her mask back down, feeling slightly sick and dizzy but craving more. She stirred the straw in it a little, took another sip, and trotted back to the commons.

Things had changed rapidly. Someone had stacked several chairs on top of one another and Soldier stood on them like they were a defeated enemy, waving a leg of ham covered in tinsel. He was in full battle dress, as he had been every day of the ceasefire, though the grenades on his bandolier had been replaced with bright red ornaments. The chicken he had acquired was roosting on his arm, staring silently at the crowd. As Pyro hung in the doorway and watched, Demo clambered up next to him. In another moment they were belting out something that may have begun life as a carol.

Scout hooted from where he had scrambled up onto the mantlepiece. “You ain’t singin’ it right! Can you believe these guys? You can’t even sing!”

“Can so!” Demo shot back, the chair mountain shuddering dangerously under his feet. “I was in choirs when I was a lad! So there!”

Something whizzed through the air and smashed against one of the chairs, and Pyro looked in time to see Scout pluck another pine cone off the evergreen boughs hung near his head. This one hit Soldier square in the middle of his helmet, exploding. The chicken squawked, flying into the air and directly toward Scout. A second squawk, a human one, followed, and Scout fell off the mantlepiece. On cue, the chair tower tumbled apart, sending both Demo and Soldier ass-over-teakettle and directly into the tree. Pyro didn’t notice herself laughing until she had to stop to catch her breath.

 

* * *

 

This wasn’t so bad. It was actually sort of fun.

Over the last hour or so the BLU mercenaries had gotten the tree upright again, salvaged what ornaments could be salvaged, and in a display of actual teamwork decorated the towering evergreen together. Engineer showed up, after a while, and immediately got the wreath dropped onto his head by Sniper. (“You look funny without some sorta hat, mate.”)

Pyro had drained her first eggnog, which left her feeling warm and pleasant, and was working her way through a second when Scout started yelling about how hungry he was. A few minutes later they were all jostling elbows at the cateen table, in front of hocks of ham (still tinsel-laden), sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, bread and butter, and the like. There wasn’t much in the way of variety, but Pyro piled as much onto her plate as anyone before heading back to her room.

When she closed and locked the door behind her, the silence was suffocating. If she listened she could still hear her team chatting and talking over one another in the distance. The far-off murmur made her room seem lonely. Loneliness wasn’t a familiar feeling.

Scarfing her food down in record time, she made it back just soon enough to see Soldier with one boot planted square on the edge of the table. “A toast!” he hollered, thrusting his beer high into the air. “To America! To _us_!”

He was met with a chorus and clinking glasses. Pyro’s drink jumped in its jar as she joined in.

It was strange, being social. Or being in a social situation, that might have been more accurate. For the bulk of the next hour or so Pyro kept to herself, finishing off the second jar of eggnog and grabbing another. She felt more pleasantly disposed toward the team than she had in … well, in as long as she could remember. It was a nice feeling, she thought, watching them.

That changed the minute Demoman noticed her. “‘Ey!” he said, waving a cookie smothered in frosting at her. “Pyro, don’t be a wallflower! C’mere!”

C’mere she did, lured more by the promise of sugar than Demo’s invitation. He let her pluck the cookie out of his hand and chuckled as she broke it into pieces small enough to slip in through the filter. “Thought you’d like that. Say—that Scout’s eggnog you’re drinkin’?”

“What?” she said around crumbs and frosting. “Oh. Yeah. It’s really good.”

“Engie say that was alright for you to have?”

She had started to swallow the cookie, and choked on it once she realized what he had said. One coughing fit later, she shrugged off the hand Demo had started thumping her on the back with and squinted at him, her good mood souring. “Why the hell would I need Engineer to tell me that?”

Demo stopped short, staring at her. “…Ah, just. Well. Nevermind.” He leaned against the card table and took a pull off his own drink, glancing off at the rest of the room for a moment. Pyro watched him a minute longer before taking a noisy, pointed straw-slurp from her eggnog. That got his attention again, and this time he looked her up and down. “You been feelin’ alright, lad?”

“As much as I ever do.”

He gave her a look. At least, she thought it was a look. Maybe it was a normal expression and she’d forgotten that, too. “What, uh.” She had also forgotten how to make conversation—or, no. She’d never had that skill. “What about you?” she asked, trying to shake off the irritation.

“Well as anyone, I s’pose. Glad for the break. I think this is just wha’ the team needed,” he said, gesturing to the room. “Bit of time t’get our spirits up again, aye? Nothin’ like a party for that.”

“Yeah.” And that was all. It only occurred to Pyro that the prolonged silence might have been awkward when Engineer joined them. The look of relief on Demo’s face was practically a neon sign. She pulled her eyes away from him to greet Engineer instead. “Hi.”

Engineer nodded to them both as he leaned in to grab a piece of peppermint bark from the plates. “Hadta get away from Scout,” he said, shaking his head. “Kid’s got the tolerance of a kitten. I didn’t think he could talk quicker’n he already does, but you get one, two beers in him...”

Pyro peered over Engineer’s shoulder. There was Scout, alright. He stood on a chair with an empty plate in his hand. It nearly flew out of his grip as she watched. He was gesticulating wildly, pantomiming whatever story he was rattling off. “Is he—”

“Say, that ain’t the eggnog, is it?”

“...Yes.”

Engineer nodded slowly, taking a bite out of his candy. “It any good? I ain’t tried it yet.”

Slowly, Pyro ungrit her teeth. Demo was looking between the pair of them like they were talking about aliens. “Yeah, it’s great,” she said, taking another sip. “I’m going to drink all of them if nobody stops me.”

Engineer grinned. “That good, huh? I better go get me one, then. Looks like you need another, too,” he said, tapping her bottle lightly. She followed his hand and discovered she had indeed drank the whole thing. That had gone fast. “C’mon.”

The canteen was empty. As Engineer passed her a jar, Pyro said, “Why the hell is everyone treating me like I’m five?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead he unscrewed his bottle and took a drink. After he had licked the excess off his upper lip he said, “How d’you mean?”

“I mean.” She raised her eggnog. “Demo wanted to know if I’d asked _you_ if I could have this. And what Sniper said the other day. And Medic—”

“You remember what I said, don’tcha?” he said, leaning against the counter. “That dispenser did somethin’ to your brain, Pyro. You gotta give ‘em time. Just—keep actin’ normal. They’ll come ‘round.”

Pyro shut her mouth. There was some kind of protest pulling at her, some sort of objection, but her thoughts were too foggy for her to put it into words. So all she wound up doing was nodding, and opening her own jar. Engineer gave her a smile and left her alone.

The evening seemed to go by more quickly after that. Demoman did not speak to her again. Scout ignored her, which suited her. Once in a while one of the other mercenaries would say something to her, but nothing that required much more than a nod or single-word response. For the most part, she sat and watched, and that was fine.

Then her jar was empty again. That kept happening. When she tried to get up to go find more, she nearly lost her balance. “Y’alright there?” Sniper asked as she stumbled past him toward the canteen again, sounding amused. In answer he got a loud snort and a wave of her hand.

Somehow she got to the fridge. She wasn’t sure how, she felt like she might be too unsteady to be walking around. More fun with dispenser side effects, probably. Or maybe it was food poisoning. She was eating raw eggs, after all. Whatever. She hauled the door open and slung her arm over it to stay upright as she stared in.

The last three jars of eggnog stared back. Her stomach felt a lot heavier than it had a minute ago, and suddenly more eggnog was the opposite of what she wanted. She made an exaggerated face at the jars, because she could, and decided to get punch instead.

She shut the door, turned, and all at once she was somewhere dark.

Alarmed, she turned too quickly and tripped over her own boots. Down she went, a heap of confusion and cursing. After a minute or so of feeling sorry for herself on the floor, she picked herself up and looked around.

Couldn’t see shit with her mask on, not in this light. Where the hell was she? Not the canteen. How had she even—no, lost time. She lost time, that was right, that was how. And she already felt weird. Maybe someone had drugged the eggnog. She was probably dying. The sounds of her team were coming from behind her. She had wound up in one of the hallways a little ways from the canteen.

No help for it. Pyro turned and fumbled her way back toward the sounds and lights. She hit something again as she rounded a corner. This was a night for bruises. “Shit!”

Before she could fall on her ass again, something stopped her. “Careful,” said a voice made of thunder. “What is Pyro doing in the dark?”

“Wh, I’m not, I wasn’t.” Pyro blinked, then slouched, relieved to have something else holding her up. “I got. Lost. I was just going back to the, the thing. I get lost sometimes, it’s, it’s not a big deal. What—pfft. What is Heavy Weapons Guy doing in the dark?”

In no way could she discern what the look on Heavy’s face was, but he sounded amused when he answered. “Fair question,” he said at last. “But: never mind. Come, we will go back together.”

“Yeah that, that’s, okay. Can we get punch? I haven’t even tried the punch yet.”

 

* * *

 

The punch tasted bright and sharp compared to the sweet, spiced flavor of the eggnog, and it had enough sugar in it to make her teeth hurt. She sucked down one glass and was about to start another when Heavy ushered her away from the card table and its dwindling refreshments, much to her protest. “Here, sit down now. I think you have had too much to drink.”

“No, no way,” she mumbled, tightening her grip on her empty cup. “Shit. I love this stuff. I love sweet things, I ate every single one of those candy canes I bought. It’s probably good I don’t go to dentists. I’ve never had eggnog before, have you had any? It’s so good,” she added, letting Heavy sort of ease her down onto the threadbare couch. Her legs felt numb.

“How many have you had?”

“What? Uh, oh, I dunno. Three or four. And the punch.”

His eyebrows quirked up as he sat down beside her. “That is all?”

“Maybe? I dunno.” She slouched back against the cushions, kicking her feet idly. Across the room she could sort of make out Demoman and Spy in some kind of discussion, hunched over the card table and picking at crumbs. Opposite them Sniper, Soldier and Scout were all doubled over laughing about something. Medic had passed out in the overstuffed armchair, mouth slack, and someone had hooked an ornament onto his glasses. “Where’s Engineer?”

Her teammate shrugged, even that faint motion shifting the cushions enough to make Pyro need to brace herself. The man was an earthquake. “I am not sure. He left a little time ago.”

“Oh.” She sunk deeper into the couch and started picking at a loose thread in her sweater. “Heavy?”

“Mm?”

“How do you spell ‘pyro’?”

Heavy was quiet for so long she wondered if she had imagined asking the question. It was entirely possible. Lots of things were entirely possible, evidently, she was sitting in a research facility in Alaska talking to a Russian about grammar. On Christmas. But he did answer, eventually. “Can you not spell this word?”

“I … used to be able to.” She blinked and rubbed at the mask. “I used to be able to do lots of things. Before.”

“Before?”

“Before, just, before. A really long time ago, I think. God, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I used to be able to remember things, too. I used to be smart. I used to have a house. I don’t think I have one of those anymore. I—I don’t even know where I live now,” she said, the fact dawning on her. “Jesus. How’s that for fucked up? I used to live, I lived in, I think I lived in Missouri. No. Maybe? Maybe it was Minnesota. It started with, um, with that sound. Where do you live?”

“My home is in Russia.”

Pyro snorted. “Well no shit. You don’t go back and forth from here and Russia, do you? That’d be, that’s a terrible idea, you’d be in the air all the time.” She paused. “Unless you have a teleporter. One of Engineer’s—shit, I bet we all have teleporters, is that how it works? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything. Where’s my straw? Didn’t I have … hey, did the eggnog taste weird to you? I think there’s something weird in it.”

Gingerly Heavy took the empty cup as she thrust it toward him. She didn’t remember him ever being this gentle. It was weird. “There is spiced rum in it. And Scout spiked the punch, as well.”

Rum. Rum like liquor? She stared at him, mouth hanging open. “Oh my God. That’s alcka—that’s alcohol? That’s booze?” Pyro slapped her knee, a laugh wheezing out of the mask. “Oh, fuck, no wonder I’m screwed up. I’ve, I don’t drink, I don’t ever drink, I’ve had like three beers in my entire life before. Three. Beer’s awful. Oh my God if that’s what rum tastes like I want to drink it all the time. Am I drunk?”

“You are very drunk.”

“That’s amazing,” she said. “I’ve never been drunk before. Why haven’t I ever been drunk before? Because, no I know, because arsonists don’t, pyromaniacs don’t go out drinking, because we’re insane and we don’t have any friends because we’re sociopaths, that’s why, haha, that’s what the jury said. I think. We just set fires and kill people. That’s all we do.” Her words had been fading off into a mumble as she spoke, and by the end her voice almost dropped off entirely. She paused and drew a deep breath. “I didn’t want to kill anyone. And I’ve—and now I’m a mercenary,” she went on, half-laughing. “Me. So much for that.”

Wrapping her arms around herself, she sighed. She tried to focus on the dying buzz of the party, but it wasn’t enough to distract her from her sudden melancholy. Beside her, Heavy shifted his weight on the couch. She had almost forgotten he was there. “I did not either,” he said.

“Didn’t what?”

“Want to kill people. A very long time ago.” He took a drink from his own glass—how long had he had that? Had he always had that? It looked like water. She wanted some water. “Becoming Heavy Weapons Guy was not part of plan. Plan was university, literature. Teaching, maybe. Now, ehh, things are very different. Many things happen in a life, things that make you change who you are. You know?”

Pyro said nothing.

 

 

 

* * *

 

In the end the only thought she could focus on was how much she didn’t want to be around Heavy anymore. Not just then. She made up some excuse about getting water and staggered off. Winding up in the middle of a dark hallway again was only halfway unexpected.

So this was what being drunk was like. Felt weird. Not unpleasant, mostly. It explained why she kept running the hell into things, at least, and she preferred being able to attribute that to intoxication rather than her myriad of other problems. After a minute or so of fumbling in the blackness she found the wall with her hand. Following it was easier than not, and when it led her to the garage, that seemed convenient enough. She wanted to work on her flamethrower anyway.

Light glowed beneath the doorway. It surprised her enough that she stopped to look at the way the yellow pooled out from under the bottom. She didn’t realize there were sounds slipping in with it until they went from a faint murmur to a raised voice:

“Because I ain’t a damn turncoat!”

Pyro leaned back, startled. A moment later she crouched down, putting her ear closer to the gap. Someone else was speaking, but softly enough that she couldn’t make all of it out. _Wish only to … this offer … wasted here …_

The familiar drawl cut in again. “No. No, I reckon I’ve heard just about enough. Y’all were a right help with Smoky, and I appreciate what you’ve done, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go along with this.”

_… certain … once-in-a-lifetime … imperative that you …_

Something gnawed at the back of Pyro’s mind. It was a dangerous, prickly feeling, a growing viciousness, slowed by the alcohol inside her but burning hotter every second. She got to her feet and opened the door.

Light flooded her senses. It blinded her, leaving her blinking on the threshold. When her doubled vision steadied as much as it would, all she saw was Engineer, hands in his pockets and an uncertain slant to his mouth. “Eng—Engie?”

“Uh, hey, Pyro.” He looked her over, chewing his lip. “Party ain’t over, is it?”

“No,” she said. “I think. I’m, I was gonna work on my flamethrower.” She stepped forward and the floor lurched. Something incoherent shot out of her mouth and then she was on her knees with a dull ache in one shin.

Engineer was there. How had he gotten to her so quickly? Time was passing strangely. “Shoot, Pyro, watch yourself.”

“I’m, I am, let me go. Let go, shit. I’m gonna work on my, the thing.”

He did not let go. Instead he hauled her to her feet, shaking his head. “This late? I think I’m gonna go ahead and veto that.”

“You’re not, Christ, you’re not my father, quit telling me what to do.” Pyro pushed herself away from him. He let her, watching as she stumbled a few steps away. “Just, let me, let me do it, okay. Okay.”

His brow furrowed as he looked her over. “How much of that eggnog did you have?”

“I don’t know, a lot. Heavy said I’m drunk, I’ve never been drunk before. I didn’t know eggnog could make you drunk. Are you drunk?”

He didn’t answer right away. Was her filter shut? He was looking at her weird. Why did everyone always do that? Everyone always fucking did that. “Not as much as I’d like to be, I think. Look, it’s just—if you ain’t sober you can’t be doing no mechanical work. You’re setting yourself up to get mighty hurt.”

“S’what’s respawn’s for.”

“No, c’mon now. You’ll mess something up on the fool thing, can’t respawn a half-built weapon. Trust me on this, alright?”

She wavered. “I don’t want go back to the party.”

“You don’t have to. You probably oughta go to bed, is what you oughta do. Getting mighty late.”

Bed. Bed sounded _amazing_. She nodded, trying to rub at one eye and failing. Mask. Right. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“I’ll walk ya there, you’re like as to trip over your own feet. I don’t know what I thought I was doing out here anyhow,” he added, louder than the words before. It hurt her ears.

Pyro blinked and they had moved, back into the dark hallways which were now lit. Engineer must have found the lights. He had a good grip on her arm, steadying her as they walked. Her shin hurt, but favoring that leg was easier with Engineer’s help. “Who were you talking to?” Pyro asked.

“Huh? When?”

“Just—just now, in the garage.”

“Was just me in there.”

“But—”

“I expect you’re hearing things with all that drink in you.”

“Oh,” she mumbled. “I don’t know if it’s the drinks. I don’t—the hallucinations were really bad. In, um, before everything, at the place with the bridge.”

Engineer did not answer right away. “Yeah?”

“He wouldn’t leave me alone. He—and he’d laugh at me and he was always there and …” Her stomach lurched. Even thinking about the ghost made her tense and dizzy, worried that he might be summoned. “He wouldn’t go away. And Scout—and—that’s why I did it. I remembered. I didn’t at first but I remembered why, a couple days ago. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Engineer was quiet as they rounded the corner she blearily recognized as the one just before her room. “You talkin’ about the dispenser?”

“He’s still here,” she went on. “It’s, it’s different now, I guess, it isn’t as bad. I just—I just wanted to forget all of it. That’s all I wanted. I still want to forget it. I did for a long time and then—on the tower, and … there’s, there’s so much I can’t remember. It’s like I was asleep even when I was awake. Nightmares, I get so many nightmares I can’t even remember them all. I can’t remember anything except things I don’t want to. I hate this.”

“We’re here,” Engineer said gently, and she noticed they had stopped walking. She was just leaning on Engineer now, sunken and slouched. Had she locked the door? She couldn’t remember. Before she could fumble into her pockets for the key she noticed it was already open. That was good. Engineer was watching her. “You go on to bed, alright? If—if you remember any of this tomorrow we can talk about it then, if you want.”

Pyro nodded, grabbing onto the door frame when Engineer let go of her. Something held her back from the call of her mattress. Something important, something else she had forgotten until now. “Hey,” she said, “hey, wait.”

Engineer waited. Patient. He’d always been patient. She needed to figure out what the words yanking on her were supposed to be. “I wanted to … I’m not, wow. I’m not good at this and I’m drunk and I’m, I’m just not good at this. Thank you,” she added.

“It weren’t nothin’,” he said. “Think you would’ve got lost otherwise.”

“No, not—no. Not this, just now, I mean.” She changed her mind. She didn’t like what being drunk did to her ability to talk. It felt hard to breathe and she couldn’t get her thoughts straight, and her face was itchy as hell.

The air was bitingly cold on her skin as she pulled the mask off, exhaling slowly. “Thank you,” she repeated, wiping some sweat from her cheek, the scarred one. Dimly she registered the surprise on his face, the wide eyes and hiked eyebrows. That was okay. On an impulse she tucked the mask under her arm and reached out, taking his hand. Her grip was tighter than she had thought it would be, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. “For everything. For, for Texas and for not shooting me and just. For all of it.”

Something passed over Engineer’s face, something that moved so quickly she couldn’t tell quite was it was. A sort of flicker, a shadow. But it passed as soon as it came, and Engineer just sort of let out his breath, slowly. She felt him squeeze her fingers, and he gave her something that was almost a smile.

“Sure, campfire.”


	18. 17: Ilunga

### 17\. i·lun·ga  _(Bantu)_
    
    
    1. a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.”

 

* * *

 

There was light. Dimly, it occurred to Pyro that she was awake. Furthermore, waking up felt like being pulled piece by piece through a drainpipe. Pyro groaned and buried her face under the pillow, trying to disappear back into the depths of sleep and her bed. Then the throbbing came, a heavy, angry tempo behind her eyes.

Two minutes later she was hunched over in the nearest bathroom stall, heaving with such violence she was certain her entire stomach lining was going to come up. Nothing did, save some vile-tasting spittle and mushy lumps of what might have once been food.

By the time she finished her cheeks were damp with tears. The throbbing had blossomed into a vice squeezed around her skull. On shaky legs, she got up and pulled her mask back on.

Before she could even collect herself enough to open the stall door she ripped it off again, falling back to her knees for another round of heaving.

 

* * *

 

Someone said something. The words hardly reached Pyro as she tried to stay upright. Her gut ached terribly, and her mouth was bone-dry and tasted like rot, so she had made her unsteady way to the canteen. Now she was clinging to the doorway, head pressed against the frame as she waited for the world to stop spinning.

“Oi, Pyro.” She looked up, slowly. Demo stood before her, eyebrows raised, and a glass of water with a straw in it in his hand. “Hangover?”

“Nnnmm.”

“Drink this,” he said, pressing the glass into her hand. She tried. The straw bumped against her mask. A pathetic whine ebbed out of her. “C’mon, now, I can’t drink it for you.”

One way or another she got the mask open and the straw in her mouth. The tepid water was better than nothing, and she gulped at it until Demo pinched the straw. “Hey!”

“Ye don’t want to chug it, trust me. Sit down, ol’ Demoman’ll fix you up.”

She didn’t want to sit down. She wanted to crawl back into bed and maybe vomit again, not necessarily in that order. But when Demo put his hand on her back and nudged her toward the chairs, she fell into step all the same. The path of least resistance sounded better than anything else.

She dropped into the closest one, slumping forward onto the table. The wood was cold and unpleasant against her hands, and she tried to retreat deeper into her sweater. Wasn’t this what she was wearing last night? She must have slept in her clothes. When had she gotten to bed? She had spoken to Heavy and to Engineer, and they’d had dinner …

She had gotten drunk. Oh, God, she had gotten really, really drunk.

Something clattered onto the table in front of her. Another cup, next to the water. She winced at the sound. “Drink that, too.”

“I don’t wanna. I don’t want anything.”

“It’ll fix the headache, c’mon.” He slid into the chair next to her, watching as she glared at the mug he had put in front of her. “Ye got to learn to handle your liquor. Don’t want to be like Scout, do we? Hittin’ respawn after every party?” Demo chuckled. “Boy won’t ever stop bein’ a lightweight, the way he does it.”

Pyro grumbled something, though what she was trying to say got lost somewhere between her brain and her mouth. Even so, she grabbed the mug and the straw Demo had dropped into it, and took a sip.

Cream and nutmeg.

Her stomach lurched, and she had to bite down hard on the inside of her mouth to keep herself from spitting it out. It went down with a pained swallow and she shoved the mug away, hacking. The cup tipped over entirely, sending the eggnog spilling out over the table. She ignored the way Demo jumped in his seat and instead grabbed for the water, practically dumping it into her mask in her desperation. When it was gone she slammed the mug down, still halfway gagging. “Demo, what the hell!”

While she had been sucking down water, he had grabbed a dishtowel and was sopping up her mess. “Hair of the dog,” he said, shaking his head. “Drink more’a that what got you. Doesn’t need to be much. It helps, Pyro.”

Screw that. The rich taste still lingered in her mouth, warmed-over and foul. “Hell no,” she managed at last, burying her face in her arms. “God, hell no.”

She stayed that way as he cleaned up the mess, hunched and feeling sorry for herself. Demoman said nothing until he had finished wringing out the towel in the sink and sat back down beside her. She could feel his eyes—well, eye—studying her, until she heard him sigh and the chair squeak as he scooted closer. Something prodded her arm. “What’s the matter? Not includin’ the hangover. Ye ain’t been … yourself, lately.”

Her temper soured further, which was apparently possible. “What do you care?”

“What’s that?”

“I said why do you care?” she repeated, lifting her head up to glare at him. “Why the hell do you care if I’m ‘myself’ or not, you don’t even know me. God, nothing around here makes any sense. Fairy-tales and _don’t touch, Pyro_ , and Soldier carrying that stupid chicken around and no one bats an eye, and we’re all immortal and everyone treats me like I’m stupid—I’m not stupid,” she said, flashing back to the night before. “I’m not stupid and I don’t need a babysitter and why do you even care if I have Engineer’s _permission_ to get drunk or not?”

Demo, leaning on his elbows with his hands propping up his chin, had his eyebrows so far in the air they seemed likely to leave his face. Pyro bared her teeth at him, because she could and he would never know, and dropped her head back onto her arms.

For a time he remained as he was, watching her. Then he sat up, drawing in his breath, and said, gently, “We’re teammates. That’s what a team does, aye? They look out for each other. That’s why.”

Pyro narrowed her eyes, trying to find the catch, waiting for the “but.” It never came.

 

* * *

 

In the end, she didn’t answer his question. But he did get her more water when she asked, and she managed a half-hearted thank-you as she left the mess with it.

When she got back to her room, the moment she dropped back into bed all desire to be awake she may have had left her. She bolted down the water and fell into merciful sleep. It was broken almost as soon as it came.

BANG BANG BANG. Pyro jerked so violently she smacked her head against the wall, and when she tried to right herself she sort of fell over on one arm and wound up with her own hair in her mouth. It tasted disgusting, greasy. She spat it out and dragged her pillow over her head.

BANG BANG BANG. She groaned into the mattress. Her skull felt like it was going to shatter. “What,” she mumbled. BANG BANG BANG.

Fuck. Fine. Dragging herself out of bed and pulling the mask back on felt a little like torture, even though she brought her blanket with her. She had forgotten to close the filter again after taking it off and didn’t bother closing it now. One more tectonic blow against her door and she yanked it open, the handle cold against her bare palm. “What?!”

There stood Scout. His hat was missing. He blinked down at her, and then his eyes narrowed. “Took you long enough, you deaf?”

She contemplated shutting the door in his face. “What is it?” she repeated instead, digging her fingers deeper into the blanket. “I’m trying to sleep.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Yeah well you better hurry an’ wake up, okay, look, so you’re gonna help me out here,” he said. His words were flat and heavy, concrete. “You’re gonna come with me out to the field an’ you’re gonna put that dumb scrapheap of yours t’some use already, I don’t wanna touch the damn thing so you gotta do it, the damn snow’s the only place I ain’t checked for my tags so I need you to melt it down some.”

She narrowed her eyes. “No.”

“’Scuze me?”

“It’s too cold. I’ve got a fucking hangover, I’m not going out there and I wouldn’t go out there for you anyway.”

The way he stared at her, squinting and mouth slung half-open, told her she’d caught him by surprise. Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. He drew himself up and stepped toward her, a foot in her doorway, bristling. “Look, moron, I got a whole friggin’ battlefield’a snow I gotta go diggin’ through, least you could damn well do is help me out, alright, least you could do, but hey maybe instead you wanna spit out whatever the hell it was you were talkin’ to Engineer about the other day, huh? Maybe it was you took my tags, is that it? You’ve been real talkative lately, ain’tcha, regular Chatty Cathy, how ‘bout you open your mouth an’ tell me what it is you’re s’posed to be apologizin’ to me about?”

Through his tirade he had been moving closer and closer, crowding her. Pyro had stood her ground throughout it, little cracks and pops of anger snapping through her, until the very end. As Scout finished he gave her one more leer and stuck his face inches from hers, but it was what he said at the last that finally forced her to step backwards.

There were words scratching at the back of her throat. She couldn’t get them out. Her mouth was as dry as summer grass.

Scout said, “Well?”

“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her teammate glowered at her, lip curled. Smoke seethed out between his teeth, black and tarry. Pyro watched it float up and fade into nothing. Was that normal? No, it couldn’t be. She swallowed down the sudden lump in her throat and straightened her back, trying to be as intimidating as being bundled in blankets would allow. “I didn’t take your thing. Your tags. And I’m not going anywhere, so screw off.”

“Screw o—you little smart-mouth I oughta—”

She slammed the door on him. A pained shriek split her ears as Scout’s fingers were caught between it and the frame, and then it banged open again. Scout was upon her in the next instant, grabbing her by whatever he could get. Pyro felt the blanket rip halfway off her shoulders. “That freakin’ _hurt_ you lowlife—nutjob— _mumblin_ ’—”

Something in her pounding head blinked out entirely.

She shoved back against him, the blanket coming off in his hands, and as he stumbled into the doorway she bolted. _You can’t outrun him,_ came the thought, but she was beyond caring. She skidded around the first corner, passed a handful of the other mercenaries’ rooms, and nearly made it to the common area before he caught up with her.

And did he catch up with her. “HEY!” boomed in her eardrums right as something snagged the back of her sweater, and she yelped as she was thrown into the wall. Scout was inches from her, mouth moving quick as lightning or maybe an oncoming train, and she barely caught any of what he said. _Actin’ real guilty—sick of you—knock some—stupid—_

Mostly she just saw his snarling face, the flash of his eyes. Smoke was pouring out between his jaws and his long sharp teeth again. Her head was killing her, it hurt so badly she thought she might die, and the sound kept getting louder and louder and she couldn’t handle this it was too much Jesus Christ and now the smoke had turned to fire, Fire chewing up his skin and his hair and his clothes, peeling it away to reveal the black flesh and scales beneath, down his shirt and her sweater it was everywhere, it had come for her again, she didn’t even need to understand what it was saying to hear the accusation and violence and hatred in its words and she was burning alive and she would never survive and the smell of charred skin clogged her nose like so much blood.

When she lifted her hands and swiped at him, nails raking across the melted flesh, she didn’t remember deciding to do so. When he reeled back, squalling, she watched herself leap onto him, clawing, scratching, an unholy keen echoing out of the mask. When he slugged her square in the cheekbone, snapping her head sideways with an ugly crack, she did not feel it.

The longer the fight went on the further away she seemed to go from it. None of the pain reached her, none of the shrieking fury she had become matched what she felt. It was like being behind glass. Even when she did try to get up after Scout hurled her off of him and onto the ground, none of her limbs seemed to work right. She stayed where she was and watched the monster get to his feet, another long stream of words she couldn’t understand pouring out of him like the smoke that boiled from his mouth.

A plaintive whining sound filled her ears, and it took her a moment to understand she had made it. It was a wounded-animal sort of noise, high and pitiful. As the monster got nearer finally her legs began scrabbling to get upright again, acting without her. All of her seemed to be acting without her, actually, and the instant she got to her feet again her body decided to run.

Her mind flickered. Pounding feet and hard breathing and an unrelenting terror. A moment later she had stopped moving. Now she was pressed against something warm and solid, and she could feel herself trembling. Only when her fingers curled tighter did she realize they were buried in something soft, something that felt like cloth. Her head was going to split in half. She tried to let go, to pull back enough to see what the hell she was holding onto, and something in her arm spasmed. Nothing else happened. A sob wracked the air. Her chest was heaving. Her face was wet.

“What in the name of … Pyro? Pyro.” Engineer’s motor-rumble voice was a beacon in the dark. Something rested on her arm and she wanted to leap away, shove the offender off of her, _don’t touch me,_ but it was like she was rooted to the spot and her grip only grew tighter. When she tried to speak instead, all that came was gibberish.

Even her voice had been taken from her. The panic that had been rising in her gut spilled over. It gushed through her brain and began to drown her. The last thing she heard was Scout’s yelling cutting in over the throb in her skull, a dragon-snarl that plunged her into unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

Somewhere in the last fifteen seconds, every drop of Dell’s blood had turned to ice.

This curious phenomenon coincided with the event of Pyro barreling straight into him as he came back from the shower. She would have knocked them both over if he hadn’t managed to stop himself with the wall, and the next thing he knew she had fisted both hands in his shirt and buried her face against him for good measure, an extremely awkward position given that she was taller than him. The only thing he’d gotten out of her before Scout rounded the corner and skidded to a stop was an unintelligible whimpering that sounded more beast than human.

And then Scout: “Butt out, hardhat!”

“What is going on here?” Dell said, looking up at him. The boy looked fit to strangle something, and Dell’s grip on Pyro’s shoulder tightened by degrees. “Pyro, let go of me.”

Pyro did not let go. She was all tension and shudders and panicky little gasps.

“Your freakin’ pet psycho slammed my hand in the door is what,” Scout said. He spoke through grit teeth, white-knuckled with clenched fists. “I was tryin’ to talk to him about somethin’ and he slams my hand in the door then freakin’ runs away, little bastard, was talkin’ like it had a brain for once even, real friggin’ rude too, what, you teach it to talk, teach it to cuss me out, you got a giant parrot in there? Shit I don’t even care, listen just, just you stay outta this Engie I ain’t got no damn business with you.”

Dell felt his expression grow hard. “Look here, you just calm down. What—”

“Calm down, _calm down_ , he scratched my face up with them claws he’s got an’ you’re tellin’ me to calm down! Lookit me!” He gestured at his face with swollen red fingers. Angry welts rose up on his cheekbones and jawline in a dozen places. A moment later he dropped his hand, posture loosening and his anger replacing itself with disgust. “Y’know what. Y’know what, no, f’geddaboudit, ain’t neither of you even worth talkin’ at, neither’a ya, you always take his side Engie don’t act like you’re some frickin’, some frickin’ saint, this is just like last time. You gonna point a gun at me for yellin’ at your boyfriend ‘cuz he attacked me again, is that what you’re gonna do if I don’t calm down?” Scout’s lips twisted in an ugly sneer, frustration buried deep in the folds of his furrowed eyebrows. “Forget it. Forget both’a you.”

That was it. Scout shoved his hands deep into his pockets and turned tail, shoulders hunched and head down. Dell couldn’t find it in himself to stop him as he stalked away.

And anyway, the sickened sinking in his stomach told him he had just acquired a much bigger problem.

Dell shook Pyro’s shoulder again once Scout had gone, ignoring the paranoia rising in the back of his head. “Py—Pyro,” he said. “C’mon now, let up with this. Scout’s left. You’re worrying me, this … this ain’t like you.”

“Hh’s ghhn?” she said, moving her head a little to look over her shoulder. Dell winced as the mask dug into his chest. She let go, stepping back, and just sort of stood there, drawn in on herself, twisting her hands in front of her.

“What happened there?” Dell said. Act regular. Act natural. Maybe she’d just had one of her bad reactions, maybe she’d been hallucinating again. “You slammed his hand in the door? Why?”

She tilted her head to one side and said nothing. A chill ran down Dell’s spine.

 

* * *

 

On. Off. On. Off. Like a lighter. That’s what it felt like as she came in and out of awareness.

Reality was a rainbow smear on her lenses. Pyro caught glimpses of it as it passed her, drab one moment and bright the next. It was like looking in from afar, as if it has spat her out.

Her body kept moving, on its own and in strange ways, like a puppet with unseen strings. Whenever she came back to the glass wall separating her from the body that used to belong to her she could watch it, sort of, doing and saying things she didn’t understand. Once she saw it carefully ripping something into neat strips and lining them up in some sort of pattern, and the next time she flickered back in it was all on the ground and there was shouting in the air. “I told ya knock that off, God’s sake Pyro—”

“I don’t wanna,” answered another voice, and Pyro felt the vibrations of having stomped her right foot.

Now she was gone again. She wasn’t sure if it was better or worse than the glass. Here, in whatever strange beyond she had found herself in, there were memories. They weren’t things she felt very inclined to revisit. Torrential rain and isolation. Being sixteen and desperately trying to figure out how to work the cash register before her boss came back. Being seventeen and lighting the cash drawer on fire. Still being seventeen and getting arrested for the first time.

Further ahead. Hitchhiking. Fire. The trial. The diagnosis. Pyromaniac. Fire. Fire.

A box of sparklers.

A gapped grin. A hockey stick. A screeching bus, a gas mask, a boy with a bat a black sky set aflame a lighter fire a limp body—

—a lighter—

—a box of sparklers.

She knew all that. After that. What came after that? Train cars, alleys, patching up literally anything and everything with duct tape stolen from corner stores. Women’s shelters where she was turned away because she refused to remove her mask, even after she had hidden her flamethrower. Thunderstorms and Walgreens. Horrific pain and darkness, and then the bright light of white room and the smell of antiseptic. Fire. Fire. Black, choking smoke that her mask could no longer filter. Hunger. A man with a gun and a dog. A purple dress. Fireworks. Scout. A lighter. Blood.

That was where things had cut off, before now. A blank void and then a muddled everything, vibrant colors and a sense of contentment but little else until she had tried to punch Engineer in her room.

But that was before.

 

* * *

 

Pyro blinked. She swallowed, wet her cracked lips. She reached up to rub at her eyes, knocked her hand on the lens, and stared at her fingers as she moved each one individually.

It was over. She lifted her head slowly, and the motion brought her hangover screaming back to life. A low wail rattled out of her lungs as she brought her hands to her temples. The pain drowned out everything else.

Where was she? When she could lift her head again she looked around. Metal, crates, blueprints and tools and— “Engineer?”

Engineer stood with his back to her, staring out the window. Rusty late-afternoon sun rays were the only source of light. Hadn’t it been morning? All she could make out of his black silhouette was that his arms were crossed. “What,” he said. His voice sounded wrong on him.

Pyro swallowed again, cringing at her dry mouth and the sickening aftertaste of eggnog. Instead of answering right away, she stood from where she had apparently been sitting against the wall. She didn’t even know what to ask. “Is—how did I get here?”

“I can’t damn well understand your mumblin’ with that stupid mask on, Pyro, I told you.”

Christ, she was sorry she asked. But once he had called attention to it she was suddenly aware of how uncomfortable the mask had become, and how the inside of it smelled of warmed-over cream and sweat. The nausea overpowered her. She tried to brace herself against it, only to be slammed with another wave of gut-wrenching sickness. Engineer regardless, she had pulled it off half a second later to clap her hand over her mouth and groan pitifully.

Engineer turned. His eyes widened a little, and then narrowed. “You still crazy?”

“What?” Her voice was muffled beneath her hand. She sank back against the wall as her stomach lurched. “No. Yes. Whatever you want to hear, God, I need some water.”

“On the bench, there,” he said, nodding toward the smaller workbench a few feet to her left where a cup with a straw sat. She leaned over far enough to grab it and gulped, the straw ignored. The water was lukewarm and had a metallic sort of tang to it, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. It was drained in three swallows and she took a huge breath as she put it back down, groaning. “You alright?”

“I’m going to go respawn myself,” she mumbled, looking toward the door. That was what Demoman had said, right? Something like that? It made sense, anyway, though she wasn’t sure if she could walk without vomiting right now.

A hand on her shoulder prevented her from trying. “No, hold on now, we got to talk, you’ll go an’ lose your memory if you do that.”

“Talk about _what_?”

“About—are you telling me you don’t remember any of that?”

A weariness overcame her, dragging on every limb. She cast her gaze aside before the answer crawled out of her. “Some of it.”

That was half the reason she wanted to put the shotgun in her mouth right now. The memories had crashed back into her at last, a tidal wave of color and confusion, and her sandcastle defenses crumbled under it. Dragons and rainbows, magic and simplicity. Nothing had hurt.

Her skull throbbed again.

“How much is some?” Engineer asked her, letting her pull away and wipe at where his hand had been. When she shrugged, he said, “Christ Almighty, Pyro, talk to me, you’ve been nigh-on comatose going on ten hours now.”

“Make up your mind.”

“What?”

She rounded on him, sneering. “First you were saying I was sick and now I was comatose?”

He blinked at her, leaning back. “Hold on now—”

“I wasn’t comatose. I wasn’t fucking comatose, I wasn’t sick, I was—I was someone else, I turned into someone else, I turned into an idiot! Everyone treats me like a goddamn moron because I was one!” She stopped for breath, curling her hands into fists. “I just spent t-the, the last God-knows-how-long not being able to control my own body, I watched all the shit I was doing and I couldn’t stop any of it, do you have—do you have any idea what that feels like? Do you even know what happened to me?”

“’Course I know what happened to you, I saw it happen. I spent two damn years trying to fix it.” Pyro clamped her jaw shut. “So you remembered after all. You—yeah, you were a moron. Ain’t no other word for it. That dispenser you put yourself on, that thing gave you brain damage, near as I figure. Turned you into a little kid.”

A shotgun burst of laughter shredded the air and the rest of Pyro’s composure with it. “Brain damage! Me! Tell me something I don’t know, Engineer, my God! I’m a pyromaniac and a psychopath and I’ve been hallucinating for years—I agreed to light people on fire as a job and now I— _damn it_ , just, I—” A visceral wail was the only sound she could find. She flung the mask down for the lack of anything else to hurt, and watched it smack the concrete floor with a shattering noise before bouncing away under the bench.

It was hard to breathe. Engineer did not make as if to speak again. He watched her instead, the way he might watch a wild animal. “Why didn’t you tell me,” she said, each word shredding her throat like barbed wire. “I asked you, I. That was what I turned into and you wouldn’t tell me.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Dammit, Pyro, didja really want to know, now that you do? You happy now? What was I s’posed to do, tell you that you turned yourself into a, a brainless invalid, that Demo and Sniper and the rest treat you like you’re stupid because you were? Is that what you wanted?”

“You lied to me!”

“I did it for your own good, Pyro, I ain’t never done anything but for your own good, okay?”

The nausea knotted up her stomach again. Engineer stared her down, huge and sure-footed. Pyro swallowed. “My own good.”

“All I ever did was look out for you.”

“I never asked for your help.”

“You couldn’t hardly ask to be fed, ‘course you didn’t.” He turned away as he said it, picking up some mechanical thing from where it lay splayed on the bench and starting to fidget with it. “I’m sorry you’re mad now, I’m sorry it all played out like this. But you needed help, and I was the only one gonna give it to you.”

“Then I didn’t want it,” she said, glaring at his back. “This isn’t help, you didn’t help me at all.”

He went still, just for a moment. Then it was right back to fiddling with the machinery. “You can hold a conversation now. You don’t call that help? You weren’t yourself anymore, Pyro, hell, you were barely a person at all.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be a person. Maybe I was happier the way I was.”

Engineer turned back to her, his face incredulous. “Good God, are you hearing yourself? I thought you said you remembered how damn bad you got. You barely knew not to run into traffic. Saying you were an idiot is being polite.”

“So what?” she snarled, shoulders hunching. “So I was stupid. I don’t care, are you not getting this? I was _happy_. My whole life has been a, a trainwreck, and for once I was happy and I had what I wanted and you forced me back here and you—you made me remember! Who gave you the right to decide that for me? Who the fuck gave—”

A sharp crack cut her off. A piece of the machine had snapped off in Engineer’s hand. It took him a moment to tear his gaze away from her and look down at the bent metal. With perfectly steady hands he put it all back onto the bench and faced her again, folding his arms across his chest. His expression had gone blank and empty. “You done?” he said.

“No, I’m not fucking done!”

“Then you’d better get on with it.”

A fire raged in her chest. She felt it swell and roar, and she did nothing to try and stop it. “You didn’t fix me,” she said. “You broke me in a different way and now I have to live with that. Thanks. Fucking thanks. What the hell is going to happen to me now? What happens now? Am I going to end up turning into that again? Do you even _know?_ ” She had to stop to get her breath back, inhaling in a shaky stutter. “Fuck you. I wish you had just shot me when we met.”

For a single heartbeat, a hairline fracture cracked the steel of Engineer’s expression. His fingers dug into his arms. His jaw tightened.

Then the hardness returned, casting him in iron. “Is that all of it?” he asked. His voice was perfectly even, and so soft she had to strain to hear him.

Pyro swallowed the bile that had risen in her throat in the silence. “Yeah.”

For a minute or so he was quiet, and Pyro could feel the air getting denser and somehow darker, like a gathering storm. When he spoke there was nothing—no anger, no venom, absolutely nothing—in his words. “So I break my back looking out for you, and I do my damnedest to do right by you, and after all that you wish I’d shot you. Is that right.” He broke off, chewing his lip as he stared at her. “This is what you do, ain’t it? That’s why you used the dispenser. You just—you don’t deal with your problems, you just look for the easiest way out, the most convenient fix, and everyone else be damned.” He dropped his arms and laughed. It was hollow. “Well, shit, darlin’. I ripped that dispenser you used apart. I guess you got to deal with ‘em now, don’t you? And now you got one more to deal with.”

He took two steps to the smaller bench, where the mask had rolled. Grabbing it, he turned and shoved it against her chest. She took it, barely noticing that one of the lenses had cracked.

This close, Engineer was a black hole. All the light and air in the room seemed to vanish. The way his eyes bored into her was so cold that the fury inside her nearly went out.

“I’m done with you, Pyro,” he said. “Get out of my sight. I never want to see your face again.”

 


	19. 18: Beau Geste

### 18\. beau geste  _(French)_
    
    
    1. a fine or noble gesture, often futile.

 

* * *

 

It was cold. The snow was too bright to look at. Pyro’s breath came in huge, pained gulps. Something was trickling out of her ears, sticky and hot, and she couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t put any weight on her left leg. She couldn’t think.

Her flamethrower, however, was completely whole. She swallowed, her gaze moving along the slick lines of it and where its stove-element muzzle pointed down at the RED demoman’s face. Well. It used to be a face. Now it was a charred, blasted wasteland that did not so much as bleed, stark black against the snow. He had gotten his pound of flesh, though. The aftermath of his grenades had left her deaf and half blind.

“Good job,” she whispered to the machine, feeling the vibrations of the words but not hearing them. The flamethrower—her new one, lighter and sleeker than Shark, clean and beautiful—said nothing.

Or perhaps it did, and she couldn’t hear it. Shark had spoken, sometimes. Before.

She blinked, shaking herself. Beside her, Medic moved. When she jumped, having forgotten he was there, he said something. All she saw were the scorched edges of his white coat. The hem was on fire. Without really thinking about it, she pointed her flamethrower at him and pulled the secondary trigger. A blast of air both shut him up and put out his coat.

“… warning next time,” Medic was saying, brushing himself off. Staying upright was becoming more difficult. Pyro thought about letting her knees give out. In another few seconds she might not have a choice, but Medic pointed his firehose-gun at her and suddenly she was warm. Her leg didn’t hurt as much. She wondered if it was dying. That might be a relief. Blue surrounded her. Blue and ozone. She blinked again and the world had changed. Someone was crouched in front of her, his long fingers fiddling with long metal coated in powder-blue that sparkled madly at the tips. She watched in fascination, faintly aware that what she was looking at could not possibly be there and not caring. When had she sat down?

“Pyro!”said a voice. She grimaced. The long fingers and the sparklers were replaced by Medic snapping his fingers in her face. “Honestly,” he said, letting her push his arm away. “You are better now? Yes or no? It is impossible to evaluate you in that suit.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Good.” The distinct smell of the medigun remained as the beam faded, and Medic slung the apparatus over his shoulder. “You must be quicker on the draw than this. He nearly took my head off before you got here! I am the priority target, remember?”

“Sure.”

She brushed snow off her flamethrower. Medic looked her over, adjusting his glasses. “Well. Come, let’s go.”

He turned with a flourish of his coat. Pyro fell in step after him. She left her mind behind, back in the past with the sparklers and the ghost.

It wasn’t the first time she had seen the ghost again in the last two days. There was what had happened with Scout, though she wasn’t entirely certain if what Scout had become was the same as the ghost or something new. For sure she had seen it just minutes after she had stormed away from Engineer’s workshop, heart pounding and her brain shorted out. It was amazing that she’d had the presence of mind to put the mask back on.

The ghost had been just leaning against a wall as she stumbled toward the lockers, smoking, watching her. He hadn’t said anything, and she had pretended not to see him. He was there when she popped the safety off the shotgun a few minutes later, too, and after that her memory went dark. The fact she remembered that much worried her. It meant she had done or said something before respawning, and she would never know what it was.

The ghost might have returned after that—she was pretty sure he had—but ever since Engineer things had kind of been a blur. Once the respawn nausea wore off, she had thrown herself into the new flamethrower, pulling it together overnight and thinking about absolutely nothing else whatsoever. Good thing, too. The Administrator had bellowed through every speaker on the base the next morning like they hadn’t been on ceasefire at all. Pyro respawned herself again to make up for the lack of sleep and food and ran out into the snow with everyone else.

That had been maybe an hour ago. She had not seen Engineer except for a glimpse of him in the lockers at the start of the round, and he had not acknowledged her. When she and Medic came upon him and his nest tucked in a bundle of trees a minute or so later, she returned the favor.

Medic, however, had other plans. He called out to Engineer once they were a few yards away from the nest, veering off the trodden path of snow. Grimacing, Pyro followed. Her fuel tank was empty, anyway, and it looked like Engineer had a fully-upgraded dispenser set up. As she unreeled the hose to refill her weapon (and this one was a weapon, wasn’t it? Not like Shark), she caught snatches of her teammates’ conversation through the wind. “… wondering what you have done to him … noticed you have ceased pilfering my …”

“… know what you’re on about. Ain’t interested besides …”

“… me for a fool, please! He could not have simply recovered on his own, not when respawn had no effect.” Pyro looked up in time to see Medic giving her a piercing, hungry look. “The change is not subtle. Surely something caused it.”

“Maybe something did,” Engineer said. He was focused entirely on the tiny sentry he had mounted on a rock near the high chain-link fence, and did not spare either her or Medic so much as a glance. “But I wouldn’t know. Talk to ‘em yourself, I’m not gonna play middleman anymore.”

From the corner of her eye she could make out Medic’s shift in posture, his folded arms and stiffened back. Then he turned. She fumbled to pull her flamethrower off the refuel pipe and twist the valve shut before he could make it over to her, and in her haste her glove snagged on the dispenser’s edge. By the time she freed herself, Medic was upon her. “Herr Pyro—”

He launched into a Gatling gun of questions, speaking quickly enough that they only washed over her, never reaching her. Trying to decipher them sounded hard anyway. She was so tired. For a single instant she wondered if she could just play dumb, literally, pretend she was what she had become in Teufort. The bright, chemical taste of the dispenser beam still lay sharp in her mouth.

Beyond Medic, beyond the nest, something moved. Pyro saw the faintest sliver of red well past the middle point, tucked against the cliff wall.

Several things happened at once. A vast boom shook the air. Medic collapsed forward, onto her, knocking her flamethrower out of her hands and dragging her down to the snow that had suddenly gone bright red. And Pyro, screaming and clutching at her eye where the sniper’s tracer round had penetrated after burrowing through Medic’s skull, noticed none of it.

Somewhere behind the noise of her own cries she could hear gunfire and shouting, the thunder of an explosion, rockets shrieking through the air. She barely registered the sounds or what they meant. Instead she tried to pull the shattered plastic from her skin, get the bullet out, something, anything. Her gloves were too thick, her hands were too clumsy, her mask was filling up with blood.

The bright, chemical taste surged in her mouth again. Engineer’s dispenser clunked and whirred, and its signature hum reached her ears. She had fallen back on it when Medic crumpled, and in moments she could feel the pain fade ever so little. The bleeding stemmed. A few seconds more and she could think again, and her first thought was _thank God for Engineer_.

Her vision came back in her undamaged eye just in time to see someone running toward her. Engineer, his shotgun slung over his shoulder and his coat on fire. Blood ran down his forehead. He pulled up short next to her. Pyro reached toward him with a shaking hand.

He stood there in the snow a second or two, chest heaving as he looked down at her and the corpse. An explosion behind them made him jump, and Pyro flinched.

The next thing she knew was that the hum near her head died. She didn’t realize what was happening until Engineer had already collapsed the dispenser in on itself and hauled it up onto his shoulder. She had fallen at just the right angle to watch him as he bolted for safety.

The pain clawed at her again, driving any other thought from her. Her breathing had turned into shallow, wet gasps. As the RED team closed in, she closed her remaining eye and prayed they would shoot her.

 

* * *

 

It was so cold. The RED team had ignored her. In the last fifteen minutes, too, she had watched half her team run by her without a second glance. It made sense; she probably looked like she had just been killed, and respawn didn’t catch up the bodies immediately. This probably happened all the time. Pyro had probably done it herself.

Engineer had known she wasn’t dead.

Engineer could have at the very least had the decency to shoot her this time.

Her eye throbbed viciously, overwhelming anything else in her mind. A weak cry forced its way out of her. In a flare of frustration she put her palms flat to the bloody snow and tried to push herself upright.

The motion sent such shocks of pain through her head and neck that she dropped again immediately. Anger lit up inside her, unfurling like a war flag. How could she possibly be this weak? How dare Engineer drag her back into this world? The other version of herself should be dealing with this, not her. How was she supposed to live like this, damaged and pathetic as she was?

The feeling faded as quickly as it came, replaced by something hollow. She stopped trying to do anything at all, staring into the distance. She wondered if the trauma or the cold would kill her quicker. She wondered, abruptly, how long it had taken the young man in her shed to die—if it had been the flames or the shrapnel lodged in his heart.

Across the field, something moved. Two somethings—no, only one. Desperation stirred in her. She tried to force herself up again, biting down on her tongue as her body screamed in protest. This time she managed to prop herself up on an elbow, and there she stayed, drawing breath as slowly as she could.

The something paused, then changed course. Thank God. Friend or foe, she didn’t care, as long as they would put a bullet in her. As long as they weren’t Engineer.

Her arm gave out again before she could make out who it was with her ruined sight. A few seconds later, the crunch of snow stopped right next to her head. Blinking, Pyro tried to focus on the feet in front of her.

Cleats, black with white stripes. Thick blue woolen socks stuck out of them. Oh. She was too hurt to be nervous about Scout, she decided. It seemed a pretty sure thing that he would gladly shoot her, anyway.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, yo, you alive down there?” He nudged her arm with a foot. “Quit layin’ around already. Get up.”

Damn it. Amid pain that lanced through her like needles, she lifted her head as much as she could stand. Hopefully it would be enough to draw attention to the shattered lens and the blood coating her mask and neck. It seemed to be. Scout, dizzyingly tall from her vantage point, leaned back a little and made a face. “Eaugh, okay, alright.”

She heard shuffling and the click of metal. Dragging her eye up one last time she saw the barrel of Scout’s scattergun pointed at her nose. _Thank God_ , she thought again as she dropped back into the snow, and waited.

The shot never came. A moment later he was very close, crouched down beside her. “C’mon,” he grunted, slinging her arm over his shoulder. Even the agony that accompanied her movement was not enough to overwhelm Pyro’s shock as Scout pulled her upright.

 

 

It was, however, enough to make her black out. When she came to again, she was slumped onto something. The pain had dulled to an angry throb.

 _Beep … beep … beep_. The idling sound of one of Engineer’s large sentries caught her ear. The machine stood across from her, covering the middle point, next to the remnants of a sapped teleporter. A new nest—this could be the very same dispenser that had been taken from her. Engineer was nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, quit hoggin’, you think you own the place, what, idiot, get outta the way.” Something shoved her sideways. Pyro caught the edge of the machine before she could topple over. She turned her head and Scout was glaring at her, hunched over the other side of the dispenser. Blood dripped from his chin onto the metal, pouring down a huge cut on his temple that she hadn’t noticed when he was picking her up.

An instant later his glare twisted into an agonized, glassy stare. He slumped over the dispenser, head knocking against it with a sickening smack. Pyro stared down at him, and then back up at the second Scout behind him as he pulled the knife out from the first one’s back. “Heya,” he said casually, wiping the blade off on the corpse’s shirt before sliding it back up the sleeve of his coat. He pushed the body down into the snow and leaned one elbow on the dispenser, glancing at her. “Sorry ‘bout that, he weren’t s’posed to be here.”

“What’re—are you—”

He raised an eyebrow, and tapped twice at his wrist. His whole body flickered. Pyro caught the quickest glimpse of red. “Don’t act stupid, please,” he said. The European accent that accompanied his words was so out of place coming from Scout’s mouth that it was almost painful.

Pyro took a slow, unsteady breath. When she glanced down at the corpse again, it was already gone. “What do you want?” Her voice sounded strange. It took her a moment to realize it was bouncing out of her cracked lens.

The spy dropped back into character so instantly it gave her whiplash. “Want, me, hey y’know not much, just I figured you an’ me we ain’t talked much, thought I’d change that, right? Check in on ya? How y’doin’, Pyro, lay it on me.”

This was almost as bad as the hallucinations. Maybe it was a hallucination. “I’ve been better,” she said. “Did you bring me over here or him?”

“That guy hates your guts, you need me to tell ya that? Naw, that was all me. You’re welcome, by the way. How’s not bein’ crazy workin’ out?”

She glared at him, and wished he could tell. Maybe he could, with the shattered lens. “It’s shit.”

The spy leaned back a little. Interest lit up in his eyes. “Oh yeah?”

“Why the fuck did you help Engineer do this to me? I was fine the way I was.”

He put his hands up in defense. “Whoa, what you talkin’ about? Figgered you’d like bein’ able to talk more than not, you know? You even remember how you were before? Last I talked to him he said you didn’t remember nothin’.”

She grunted, shifting her weight against the dispenser. Her eye had been healed or fixed or regenerated, whatever it was the dispenser beam did, and she blinked hard as she tried to get used to having her depth perception restored. She still felt like shit. “What do you want?” she said again.

The spy-Scout looked her over, shoving his hands in his pockets.He gave her a charming smile, lifting an eyebrow. “I need a message relayed.”

“Then do it yourself.”

“Can’t. It’s for Engineer. He got pissed with me last time I talked to him an’ now he won’t talk to me none at all. I _really_ need him to reconsider my offer.”

“What offer?”

“Just an offer. That was the point of this whole thing, yeah? Fixin’ you up.”

Her curiosity died, replaced by a numb sort of feeling. For a few silent seconds she studied him, the puzzle falling together in her head. “That’s why you did this to me?” she snapped. “To get on his good side? Jesus, do—do you guys think I’m a puppet or something? Why the hell would I help you do anything? Why would I—and you’re shit out of luck anyway because now he fucking hates me too, _sorry_. He already left me to die once today. So fuck you, I’d never help you even if I could. Fuck you and fuck Engineer.” She grabbed her axe from her belt, miraculously still there. “Happy? Nobody gets what they want.”

Snow was starting to fall again. It landed on the head of her axe only to melt instantly, and it drifted into her mask from the open lens, stinging her skin. It fell everywhere except on the Scout that was not Scout, the flakes disappearing as they were swallowed up by his disguise

Through her whole rant, the spy had watched her with the same intense, predatory look. Now, at last, he smiled. “Is that so?” he said. “How very interesting. Then I’m afraid I don’t need your help after all.”

All Pyro got to see before he shot her between the eyes was the sun gleaming off the barrel of his revolver.

 

* * *

 

The respawn system spit her back into reality. Pyro had to lean on her flamethrower to keep herself upright, mind scrambling to piece together the scattered memories of what had happened to her.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Sniper respawning right next to her. He swayed on his feet a moment, looking bizarre with his winter coat and hat and the long rifle hanging from him like a third arm. He shook his head and glanced over at her. “You too, eh?” he said, sounding totally unaffected, and loped out of the room.

Ugh. She slung her flamethrower over her shoulder and made her shaky way after, picking through her memory to try and recall what had killed her. She stopped short outside the glass doors. Standing in front of the lockers, frowning down at two guns in his hands, was Scout.

He either didn’t notice her or ignored her. Instead, as Sniper crossed the room toward the exit, he called, “Yo hey Snipes, waitaminute, hey, you been havin’ any trouble with your rifles?”

“Can’t say I have, no. Why, are you?”

“Yeah, I dunno, my scattergun keeps crappin’ out on me an’ I ain’t got any idea what the deal is, it ain’t a misfire it ain’t a jam it ain’t outta ammo. I dunno what to do an’ I don’t wanna use none’a my other guns out here, an’ Engie weren’t no damn help neither.”

Sniper paused, then turned to join Scout in examining his weapons. Pyro took the opportunity to make her escape. Looking at Scout, just now, made something in her chest tight and uncomfortable and baffled. The last thing she could remember was him pulling her up onto his shoulder out of the snow.


	20. 19: Glasnost

### 19\. glas·nost  _(Russian)_
    
    
    1. an official policy of the Soviet Union emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings; literally, publicity or openness.

 

* * *

 

Pyro’s spot at the canteen table was empty again. By Heavy’s count this was the fifth meal in a row. He had scarcely even seen his most unusual teammate in the kitchen since the war started back up. To add to it, Pyro had been late in getting to the lockers every day this week, and equipped himself without so much as a nod to any of them.

More to the point, both he and Engineer had been actively avoiding one another. On the base it was one thing, but this unexpected rift reached even the battlefield. Heavy had witnessed Pyro go well out of his way for health and ammo rather than recover at a sentry nest several times, and Engineer had become uncharacteristically high-strung and liberal with his wrench for lack of a spy-checker.

Even if the telltale signs of a falling-out had not been there, Engineer’s mood of late had kept the rest of the team from speaking with him, too. Tonight, after yet another stalemate that had ended with pushing RED back to their final point, the tension in the air seemed to be radiating directly from the man himself. Engineer had said barely a word at meals in days.

“So,” Sniper said over his coffee, “New Year’s Eve tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“In the West, yes,” Spy answered. “Depressing to think we have been here so long as for the year to pass.”

“How bad ya think we’d catch it if we threw the fight?” Scout said, chewing his fork. “I mean I ain’t sayin’ we should but I’m just sayin’. We get the pay halved but it ain’t like we don’t get paid, we been here long enough we’re still makin’ mint.”

“DO I HEAR THE UNMISTAKABLE CALL OF THE YELLOW-BELLIED BOOT-LICKER?” There was a collective groan as Soldier whirled on Scout, two seats away, and leaned on Engineer’s shoulders to get in his face. “COWARDICE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED ON THIS TEAM, YOU LILY-LIV—”

He was cut off as Engineer shoved him off with more force than strictly necessary. “Would you shut up?” he said, rubbing at his ear. “Confound it, I’m near about on Scout’s side of things here. We been at this for months. It ain’t worth the damn money by now.”

“The _money_?! I was unaware that we have suddenly become _mercenaries_ instead of _proud American soldiers!_ I also thought you were a man, not a dog! _You don’t even have a tail!_ ”

“’Course I’m here for the money,” Engineer said, “ain’t nothin’ else about this team worth being here for.”

He and Soldier glared at one another. Heavy leaned back in his chair and contemplated intervening. Footsteps interrupted the brewing fight before he could decide.

The whole table looked up to see Pyro walking into the canteen, an empty plate in his hand. He dumped it in the sink and crossed to the fridge, either unaware of or ignoring the fact the team entire was watching him. He pulled out one of the last remaining cans of soda from it, popped the tab, and made for the drawer that held the straws.

He was wearing that monstrous sweater again. The sleeves had been chopped off at his wrists since Heavy had last seen it, revealing bare hands that were riddled with old burns. The sight of him in anything other than his suit was jarring at best, and the mask paired with the sweater, frayed jeans, too-large socks, and hunched posture made Pyro a figure that was an entirely different kind of uncomfortable from the one that had come before.

While the rest of the team went back to their food soon enough, Heavy continued to watch him. Their encounter at the Christmas party had been hanging on him no matter how he tried to shake it off. Pyro had been acting oddly before that, yes, yet at the party he had turned everything Heavy had thought he had known about him on its head.

He wondered if Pyro had yet learned to spell his name.

Pyro ripped open the drawer. He rummaged through it for a moment, grabbing a fistful of straws. When he yanked his hand away Heavy glimpsed the raw edge of his sweater catch on the wood.

The drawer crashed to the floor like a bomb, the straws and cutlery and everything else exploding out of it. The team flinched almost as one. Muttering to himself, Pyro knelt to pick it all up.

Spy, who was seated nearest where the drawer had fallen and had borne the brunt of the sound and shrapnel, said, “I realize we cannot hope to expect anything resembling grace out of you, Pyro, but have a little more care in the future.”

It was same sort of irritable thing Spy doled out every time he was annoyed with anyone. The team scarcely registered them anymore. But Pyro, on his knees, went very, very still.

He was up in the next moment, his hand still gripped around the soda can. Turning to Spy, for a few seconds he just looked at him. “What?” Spy said, crossing his arms.

Pyro shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and threw the full can at his face.

Spy made a sound like a wounded cat. The can crunched unpleasantly as it collided with his nose, and cola spewed out over his mask and suit. Before it had even hit the ground, Pyro grabbed him by his sodden tie. He said something in a low, angry rumble that might have been a question, and when Spy gave him a disgusted look and tried to pull away everything went to hell.

 

 

He dragged Spy out of his seat by the neck, slamming him face-first to the ground. The yelling began an instant later, and escalated into screaming in a matter of seconds. Pyro had one hand still wrapped around the tie, suspending Spy’s head off the floor with it, and the other gesticulating wildly. More than once he looked as if he would punch him, though the blow never came. The words rioting out of his mask were indecipherable, but they didn’t need translating. Pyro was the very picture of a man at the end of his rope.

Heavy looked at Engineer. He found he was not the only one—Demoman and Medic had their gaze on him, too, and a moment later Engineer noticed. His eyes narrowed. Without a word, he got up, dropped his dishes into the sink—walking right by Pyro as he howled at Spy without even glancing at them—and left the room.

Seconds later, Pyro smacked Spy in the face with his wet tie and rounded on the rest of the team. He stared them all down, bristling and shoulders heaving. A snarl of half-formed words issued from the mask, a challenge no less clear for its garbling: _anyone else want to say anything?_

No one spoke, or moved.

“… Guhhd,” Pyro said.

The air went still and uncomfortable as he stalked out. From the floor, Spy spit out cola.

 

* * *

 

Dinner finished quickly. In an ironic turn of events it had been Spy and Pyro’s turn to do dishes that night—Heavy volunteered instead, admonishing Medic when he tried to help. The doctor had been pushed harder than usual today as they drove RED back, and anyway, Heavy wanted time to think. Between the dishes and the mess Pyro had left behind, he was in the canteen for an hour before he was done.

By the end of it, though, he had drawn no new conclusions. There was the thought that Pyro now seemed much closer to the way he had behaved on his first mission, in Teufort, but that was all. Heavy could not make sense of it.

Either way, the unexpected dishes duty had interfered with his schedule.As soon as he had dried his hands, Heavy made for his room, fetched his minigun from her makeshift resting place on a bundle of blankets, and headed for the supply lockers. Not even the изверг would keep him from attending to Sasha’s maintenance.

Or so he thought. He had made it to the hallway that lead into the lockers, near respawn, when a voice made him pause almost in the doorway.

“… talk to me like that. I just … damn it, what am I supposed to do?”

It was almost familiar, the voice. Heavy peered around the corner.

Someone sat on one of the benches, elbows on knees, hands covering their face. A bundle of shiny black plastic lay beside them. Long black hair spilled over a thick sweater, and their back was most of the way to him. Smoke wafted up from a cigarette between their fingers. After a moment they straightened up, sighing, and spoke again. “He was the only one that did. Maybe Demo.” The someone took something out from their pocket, something bright blue—a lighter—and flicked it on. Let it die. On. Off. A weak laugh. “Yeah. And now you’re the only one that’ll talk to me. I fucked it all up. Christ. He was right about me,” Pyro said, and he—no, _she_ —sounded like a flame being extinguished.

Stealing a glance across the rest of the room, Heavy could see no one else. “Hell no,” she said abruptly, looking up at the wall. “He’d kill me. I—I don’t care if he did try and help me, he would drag me out of respawn range and kill me.” Pause. Silence. Heavy strained his ears but heard nothing. Pyro stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and slouched. “Of course I’m sorry. Doesn’t mean I want to die.”

These were not things he was supposed to be hearing.

Heavy took a step back, silent as he could between his own weight and Sasha’s. In the same moment, Pyro got up, turning. “No, I can’t—”

She went stock-still as she saw Heavy there in the doorway, and Heavy could not help but return her stare. Her face was not what he had ever expected: red-skinned, with slightly slanted eyes and a flat nose and broad chin. An old burn scar consumed her face from top to bottom on the right side, and beneath her dawning shock exhaustion colored her like dying embers. “… Heavy,” she said weakly, taking the cigarette from between her lips before it could fall.

He nodded, brow furrowing. “I am sorry,” he said as she glanced down at the mask that lay on the bench. “I did not mean to be spying.” He gestured to his gun. “I came to clean Sasha.”

“Oh,” Pyro said, eyes falling on the weapon. She fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve, and picked up her mask. “I didn’t know it had a name. Um. How much did you hear?”

“Not much.” Before him Pyro seemed smaller than she usually did. Without the mask, her face half-swallowed by her hair, the tension and unease smothering her was clear as day. Tonight was full of surprises. He sat down on the bench, letting her be the tall one. “Enough to say you are troubled.”

“Mm.”

“Is Heavy wrong?”

“I guess, no. No. You’re not.” She rubbed at one eye, glancing toward the door as if expecting the rest of the team to appear. “I mean, biting Spy’s head off probably made it kind of obvious.”

“A little bit.” Heavy leaned back, taking the time to line up his words. The English language was a tricky thing. “The whole team has been unhappy, I think. It is too cold for them. They are not like me,” he added, thumping his chest and smirking at her. “There is only one Russian bear on team.”

Pyro actually smiled. “Could we handle more?”

“Probably not, probably not.”

“Yeah.” Her smile waned. She took another pull from her cigarette, shifting her weight. “So, uh. I’ll let you get to work,” she said, stepping backwards.

“Pyro may stay here, if she wants,” Heavy said, leaning over his gun.

“No, I mean, I’ve—”

“She may talk to Heavy about problems instead of to wall, too.”

 

* * *

 

As the words left Heavy’s mouth, Pyro felt weariness flooding her, threatening to pull her under. She felt herself sag under her own weight. At least Heavy was looking at his gun and not her. “Oh,” she said, trying to gather herself together again.

What an offer. The very idea was overwhelming. Tell Heavy? About herself, and Engineer and Scout, and all of it? What if she did? What would happen? The thought sank into her gut and settled there. She couldn’t. She couldn’t possibly.

But what if she did?

Everything else was shot to hell. And Heavy had walked in on her speaking with something even she knew wasn’t really there, to put a cherry on top. She wondered if talking to a ghost was more or less dangerous by this point.

Confronted with her silence, Heavy shrugged, his shoulders rolling like waves. “You do not have to,” he said. “Is just offer. I am curious, I admit. You are very different, very quickly, now, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess I am.”

She dropped down onto the bench beside him, watching him begin to disassemble his gun. His Sasha. “My old flamethrower was named Shark.”

“Da?” he said, giving her the briefest glance. “I did not know this.”

Pyro shrugged. “I don’t remember naming it. I don’t think I even remembered the reason I started calling it that when I did.” She flicked the lighter on again, taking comfort from its heat. “God, that was a long time ago now.”

“How long?”

“Well—before I joined BLU.”

Heavy nodded, and she dropped the subject. More words were fighting to get out, too many to be safe. It was all she could do to keep her mouth shut. Heavy lay out the parts of his gun on the floor, taking great care with each one. “Have you remembered how to spell ‘pyro’?” he said.

She stared at him. How the hell had—no, that was right. She’d asked him that at the party, when she was getting wasted unawares. She remembered that much. “Not really,” she said. “Engineer was trying to teach me, but …”

“You are not speaking.”

“Yep.”

“Why is this?”

She looked down at her lighter. It had gone out. She tried to light it again, but the flint only sparked. The fuel must have been used up. She sighed. “That’s a really long story, Heavy.”

He did not answer. Instead, he got up, crossing to the lockers, and from his own he produced what looked like a huge bottle-brush, a cloth, and a plastic container. He sat down beside her again, lay down the brush, and picked up some part she couldn’t recognize out of the gun. He lay the part on his knee, and daubed the cloth with something from the container. “It takes me one hour and seventeen minutes to clean Sasha,” he said, putting the cloth to the metal. “I am not going anywhere.”

Pyro looked at him, playing out different answers in her head, weighing options. A part of her wanted to pull the mask back on and forget any of this had happened. Another, different part of her—the small, brave part, the one that had picked her up and walked her on shaky legs into Dell Conagher’s farmhouse, the same one that had chosen to give Scout his dog tags back in person so long ago—rose up in her, steeling her.

“Before everything started I used to live in Boston.”

After all, what else could go wrong?

 

* * *

 

By the time she finished, Pyro was out of breath, and she had struck the lighter’s flint so many times the side of her thumb was raw. She wasn’t sure if she had ever spoken so much all at once before in her life, and she hadn’t even told Heavy everything—no specifics, just generalities. “I hurt someone in Scout’s family, before we met,” she had said. “I killed him. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

All the rest tumbled after, slow and faltering but relentless. The fireworks, Engineer and the dispenser, Scout and the lighter. What she had done to herself and how Engineer had undone it. The fight. That Scout had tried to save her on the field just a day or so ago, and the way that gesture had eaten at her ever since.

Through it all, Heavy had not said a word but for clarification, or to bring her back to the present when the memories got to be too much. He had never stopped working on his gun while she spoke. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to keep going if he had focused his attention on her, really. Now he straightened his back, loosened his shoulders, and said:

“What will you do now?”

Pyro shrunk in on herself, worn out. “I don’t know. I’m screwed no matter what. Engineer was right, I’m a coward.” She exhaled and leaned on her knees, picking at the angry skin on her thumb. “What do you think I should do?”

“Me? Well.” He turned the piece of Sasha he was holding over in his hand, and then up to the dim light of the locker room. “I think it is hard to keep a secret like yours for so long.”

“But—”

“I have tried. It did not work for me. Pyro has also tried,” he added, finally turning to her, “and now she talks to walls. That is what I think.”

Pyro blinked, hard, but she did not look away.


	21. 20: Metanoia (2)

### 20\. met·a·noi·a (English)
    
    
    2. change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion.

 

* * *

 

When she respawned for the eighth time the next day, it was Sniper, hovering by the cliffs near mid, that commented on it. “All right, mate?”

“Huh?”

“Watched you comin’ back out to the field about ten times now. Bad day?”

Pyro blinked, distracted by her own thoughts even while he was speaking. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess,” she said, nodding to get the idea across.

“Bad day yesterday too, eh?”

What was he—oh. Spy and the cola. She shrugged. Sniper chuckled, more to himself than anything. “Man looked like a wet cat when you got through with him. It’s alright. We all get bad days. Have Demo tell you about the time Scout put itchin’ powder in his eyepatch.”

“Yeah,” she mumbled, trotting off toward the fighting. All she’d gleaned from the exchange was the name Scout, and the way it made her stomach bottom out.

From the moment she had opened her eyes that morning, her talk with Heavy had weighed her down her like an anchor. Even so, maybe she needed an anchor. She tied her thoughts to it, steadying them as much as she could, and slowly charted a course.

By the time the workday ended, she would die and respawn another five times, but she would also have a plan.

But first things first. Small steps. When her hair caught in her mask filter as she took it off in her room, she studied it for a second, and then got the scissors.

Snip, snip, snip. Pyro shook hair off the blades. Snip, snip, snip. A sharp knife would probably be more efficient, but she didn’t have one and neither did the canteen. There had been a cleaver almost as big as her head hanging from one wall, but that sort of seemed like overdoing things, and it was rusty anyway. What she did have were dull scissors, though she wasn’t sure when or how they had gotten into her room.

Another lock of hair fell into the bowl, joining the sloppy ponytail she had already lopped off. A few more haphazard cuts, and she put the scissors down to scrub her fingers through the scant few inches that remained on her head. She looked down at the bowl for a moment, then reached for the book of matches that lay a few feet away. Ten seconds later and she sat cross-legged, chin in hands, watching the tiny blaze.

The acrid stench of burnt hair filled the room. Pyro wrinkled her nose, but made no move to put out the fire.By the time the flames died the room was rank with it. She studied the ashes, then pushed the bowl aside and pulled her mask back on. She tugged at it here and there, getting used to the fit without anything running down the back of her neck anymore. Her hair had gotten so long in just a few years. The extra room in her mask she’d taken back from it made it easier to breathe, and she found she didn’t even mind the rank air. She felt better already.

 

* * *

 

“Where’s the fire, lad?”

Pyro pulled up short in the snow as Demoman spoke to her, shifting her scarf to better cover the gap in her suit’s collar. The wind was sighing, and it was already past dark. The faint lights on the outside of the base didn’t do much, especially not with tinted lenses—she hadn’t even noticed him until he spoke. The mask filter fell open at her touch. “Nowhere yet. What are you doing out here?”

She realized she hadn’t even needed to ask right after she said it. Two familiar bottles hung from his hands, and snow clung to their brown surfaces. “Jus’ chilling a few o’these for the night,” he said, brandishing them. “Someone’s got to celebrate the new year. What’re you doin’ yourself? That’d be the Christmas stuff ye got in town, aye?”

Pyro glanced down at the crate she was balancing on her hip, the one from Miut that had lain under her bed for a week while she tried to figure out what to do with its contents. “Yeah. Uh, I heard the guys talking about an old barn around here? Where is that?”

“Oh, that? Head that-a-way,” he said, pointing somewhere off into the darkness. Very helpful. “Why?”

“I just wanted to see it.Thanks.”

Demo nodded and left it at that. They parted ways, and after perhaps five minutes the sparse trees around the base opened up entirely, and there stood the barn.

It was an antique, dilapidated thing, painted a deep blue that was flaking off in massive chunks to reveal gray wood beneath. The roof had gaping holes, sunken by heavy snow. A handful of rusted-out farm implements leaned up against the sagging walls. The whole thing was even worse off than she had expected, but it was there and it was wood, and Pyro had not been able to stop thinking about it ever since she had asked Heavy where she could go burn something yesterday. The distraction had gotten her killed on the field more than once.

She made her way up to the threshold and hesitated. This idea, like most of the ones she had, was probably terrible. But at least, she thought as she stepped inside, it might terrible in the right direction this time.

Within it was remarkably dry, if not any warmer. Some sawhorses sat near the center, bullet casings riddling the floor at their feet, with more stacked on one another in the vestiges of a stall nearby. Hay bales stood in frozen bundles in the lofts on either side. Two aging support beams held up the ceiling in the middle of it all. Yes, this would do very well, even if the snow and ice that had drifted in through the broken windows and holes in the roof might be a hindrance. The itch in her fingers got worse as she set down the crate and kicked off the lid.

First things first. The flashlight she had borrowed from the garage lay on top of everything. It came on with a reassuring click, and she clipped it to her shoulder strap. When she leaned over the crate again it lit the whole thing up. A dozen technicolor packages cased in plastic gleamed at her. She exhaled, taking one—a narrow blue-and-gold box made of cheap cardboard—and turned it over in her hands. It was funny how you couldn’t get away from some things. She didn’t need to be able to read the lettering to know the box said BLAZING GLORY.

It disappeared into her ammo pouch, and the rest of the fireworks came out onto the floor, neatly arranged by size and color. An uncomfortable sense of déjà vu swept through her, but she carried on.

The harder part was dragging the sawhorses into the best positions. It had been so long since she had properly done anything like this that she found herself doing more second-guessing than not. In the end, she decided as she pulled the final four into a square in the middle of the structure, it probably didn’t matter that much, as long as she could be sure the center would catch fire.

She scattered some of the frozen hay that had been on the floor in the center of the sawhorses, not sure how useful it would be, and spread the newspaper still sitting in the crate over it just in case. The fireworks were next, ringing the square. Miki had not been certain if they would so much as light. According to her they had been sitting in the general store for years. Even if they didn’t, Pyro couldn’t have left them behind. This was as good a place to make use of them as any.

Looked at what she had built, she chewed at her lip, fidgeting with the flare gun she had hung on her belt before she left. She glanced over her shoulder at the crate, and turned to get the final piece.

Carefully, reverently even, she lifted the crate up and put it in the center of the pyre. For a few seconds she gazed down into it, pulling herself together. “Sorry about this,” she said at last. Her own voice was unfamiliar to her with its gentleness.

The thing in the crate said nothing, of course. Flamethrowers didn’t talk. All the same, she felt she owed Shark the apology. They had been together a long time—too long, even. It had become so much a part of her and her past that it would do well as an effigy. She touched its gas pump handle, its full propane tank, and let her fingers rest on it a few seconds before backing away.

The anticipation was getting to be too much. Her hands trembled. She took one last look at the interior of the barn, now a carefully-designed fire trap, and went back to the door.

Outside, nothing had changed. The wind blew gently, and a light snow fell. Pyro took a deep breath, looking out over the emptiness, and clicked off the flashlight. She could still make out the base from here. Maybe the team would see. Maybe they wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter.

Pyro turned her back on the snow and unhooked the flare gun from her belt. Her confidence grew as she took aim at the hay in the lofts. First one, then the other. When both had begun to blossom into bright flashes of gold and orange, hissing with smoke from the frost but still burning well enough, she allowed herself a smile.

 

* * *

 

Sniper was squinting through the window when Dell came into the canteen that. Neither paid the other any mind as Dell helped himself to whatever sort of coffee his teammate had going this late. It was anyone’s guess whether or not it would be good, or even caffeinated, but he suspected it would work well enough as a placebo. He just needed something to get him through the night. The project he had thrown himself into to distract himself from … well, from everything, really—was nearly done.

A sip told him it would do. Stale, though. Could do with something to cover that up. “Hey, where’s the sugar?”

“Huh? Oh, hell if I know,” said Sniper. “Say, c’mere, lookit this and tell me if I been drinkin’ outta the wrong jars again.”

Dell wrinkled his nose, glancing down at the coffee. He set it down on the counter and joined Sniper at the small window just above the sink. “What am I lookin’ at, then?”

“Right there. Just behind them little trees, see it?”

“Huh. Yeah. Real bright. What is it?”

“Seems like a fire to me. A right big one.”

They looked at one another. Dell felt his patience thinning as he waited for the inevitable question. He must have shown it, too, because in another moment Sniper turned and said, “I’ll go ask if anyone’s seen Pyro.”

Dell watched him go, threw back a gulp of his crap coffee, and directed his narrowed eyes back out the window.

 

* * *

 

It was a fire, all right. It was a hell of a fire. Dell had never seen anything like it, not even in the oil fields, not even when they’d set the hills aflame to clear the land back home. It was the dark and the cold that did it. This fire rose high into the night, tearing at the black winter sky as if to consume it. The snow around it served only to make it look fiercer, rawer, more furious.

He and the rest of the team got there in time to hear a terrible snapping noise. Part of the roof fell in. The small black figure standing in front of the barn, staring up at the blaze, seemed to shiver. “It is Pyro, yes?” Medic said from beside Dell.

“Who else would it be?” Dell said. “Big damn fire like that, who else.”

They had all stopped a respectful distance away. Pyro, on the other hand, would have been flattened if the barn chose to collapse toward her. What the hell did she think she was doing, Dell wondered. Beside him, Scout kicked at the snow, squinting ahead. “Who said he could freakin’ do that? It don’t belong to him, now ain’t nobody can use it, this is—”

Another part of the roof collapsed. A moment later there was a vast boom, and then a high-pitched shriek split their ears, making the whole team—except Pyro—flinch. A huge series of snaps and pops could be heard under the roar of the fire, and then something shot up out of the building. It went straight into the air, whirling as it went, and at first Dell thought it was a flare. That notion died the moment it exploded. It bloomed into a magnificent display of light, sparks billowing out among the ash and smoke in a dozen different colors. The first was followed by a second and a third, and then you couldn’t hear the fire for the fireworks.

 

 

“Where’d he get those?” someone said. Dell looked around for the speaker. He did not find him. What he saw instead was Scout with his eyes locked on the rainbow of light and his teeth grit.

 

 

Another bang went off and Scout jumped a good deal harder than Dell would have thought. His eyes cut from the show to Pyro, and then he noticed Dell watching him. “What?” he snapped. “You got somethin’ to say, spit it out, what?”

“Can’t say as I do.”

“Yeah? Good,” Scout said, gaze jerking back up to the inferno as if he could not help himself, “Good. Have fun with your dumb New Year’s crap, it’s too cold, I’m goin’ inside.”

He turned and began to walk away. When a particularly loud explosion rocked the air, he broke into a jog.

A few minutes later, with one last hard stare at Pyro’s silhouette, Dell followed suit.

 

* * *

 

Under her mask, Pyro’s cheeks were wet.

She was not sure when she had begun crying. Stopping didn’t feel like an option at this point. Some part of her had gone up with the smoke from the barn, more of herself than she had been prepared to give, but she felt lighter for it.

It was unlike any blaze she had set before, and she could feel the difference in her bones. Arsonist she may have become, but before BLU, before the fireworks, she had never burned anything for any other reason than the joy of seeing the Fire again. Having a purpose and meaning in the flames changed them. The ecstasy was still there, yes, the thrill that soothed the itch in her hands and quieted the static in her brain, but there was something new and strange behind it.

Before her, the Fire ate up the barn as gladly and easily as it had eaten up her shed, her house, her friend. The fireworks rocketing out of its collapsing form were nothing compared to the memories, but they were close enough. This was the best she could do to recreate that July night.

Back then, she had run. She would not run again.

At some point the team had shown up behind her, standing well back from the blaze. She had barely noticed them when they arrived, and by the time all four walls had collapsed into a black and smoldering pile she had forgotten they were there at all. It didn’t matter. The fire wasn’t for them, anyway.

She had forgotten most everything else, too. Her hands and feet were numb from the cold, and she was shivering even though her suit still felt warm from the flames, and her knees ached from standing. How long had she been here? How long had the blaze been burning? Long enough, apparently, that when she looked over her shoulder again the eight men behind her had dwindled to one.

Heavy lifted his hand when she nodded to him. A moment later he was beside her, at the edge of the remains of the barn. He looked over the smoking remains with a grave expression. “It is done?”

Pyro swayed on her legs and pulled off her mask. The snow was still falling, gentle, mixed in with ash and shrinking flames, and there was no more wind. The whole world breathed easy. “Yeah, just about.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“The fireworks, I did not expect.”

She snorted, swiping at her wet eyes. Not much to be done, there, not while she was still outside. The tears would probably freeze on her eyelashes.

Tucking her mask under her arm, she grabbed the box in her ammo pouch. She shook it open and pulled one of the sticks out, metal and blue powder. “Here,” she said, handing it to Heavy. “Have you ever lit a sparkler?”

He blinked down at her before taking it. “Not in many years,” he said, spinning it between his fingers.

“Me either.”

“Where did you find these?”

“That town down the mountain. Kind of felt like I was supposed to get them, I guess.” Pyro got one of her own, and knelt before the still-burning remnants of the front wall. She put the tip of the sparkler to the flame and it lit after a few seconds, sputtering and hissing. Something stirred in her heart as she watched it. In the corner of her eye she could see Heavy mimic her. When her first one burnt out, she grabbed another and lit it the same way. “It’s New Year’s Eve, right?” she asked. “January first tomorrow?”

If Heavy looked at her, she didn’t notice. “It is.”

“Don’t people make resolutions then?”

“In America? I think so.”

“Do they do something different in Russia?”

“We wish for good luck.”

Huh. “Then maybe I’ll do that instead.” The sparkler danced. Pyro twirled it between her fingers, nodding slowly. “Yeah. I could use some of that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guest art by [teafortteu](http://teafortteu.tumblr.com) on Tumblr! Thank you!


	22. Interlude II.

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”

― _Fahrenheit 451,_ Ray Bradbury.


	23. 21: Hand

 

**ACT III.  
THE PHOENIX**

### 21\. "hat in hand"
    
    
    1. _to go hat in hand to apologize;_ in an attitude of respectful humility.

 

* * *

 

“Don’t think I have, no. Any of you lot seen Truckie?”

Pyro flinched as everyone, which was to say the other five men in the mess, turned to look at Sniper and her. The eyes on her were uncomfortable to say the least, and she’d swear their expressions had new and unfamiliar notes: suspicion, interest, caution. Most of them had not spoken to her since her outburst with Spy, and Spy himself had taken to failing to notice her presence entirely over the last few days. The only exception to the new silent treatment was Heavy, who by contrast had begun to teach her the card game she had watched him play with Medic.

She felt five pairs of eyes work her over and then depart, accompanied by answers of _nope_ and _no idea_. Sniper glanced at Pyro and shrugged. She didn’t bother to disguise her sigh as she left.

Engineer had to be somewhere. As much as she didn’t want to be in the same room with him, let alone talk to him, she felt like she had to. The fight hadn’t been all her fault, but the guilt that had been growing heavy in her gut the last few days told her what she needed to do.

It shouldn’t be this hard to find someone in a tiny base in the middle of nowhere. On a Sunday, no less. There had been no answer when she knocked at his room or his workshop. He wasn’t in any of the empty offices or unlocked storage rooms. The garage was deserted, too. She had even gone outside and made a circuit all the way around the base, just to be sure, but he was nowhere to be found. And if no one else on the team knew where he’d gone, she was stumped.

At this rate, she was going to lose her nerve to do this before she even saw the man. As she left the team in the canteen, she hung a right rather than a left. She’d check the workshop one more time. Maybe he hadn’t heard her knock.

Maybe he was just ignoring her.

Whatever, she thought as she rounded the last corner before the hallway that contained Engineer’s workshop. She would ferret him out eventually. Maybe sooner than eventually. The workshop’s door, previously shut, was cracked open.

She trotted toward it, almost afraid it would swing closed before she could get to it. It did not, and she grabbed for the handle. Instead of the cold metal she expected her bare fingers found something warm and wet.

Startled, she let go. Something red gleamed bright on her palm. More of it had dripped down the doorway, ending in a tiny, stiff-looking puddle on the floor. Before she knew what she was doing Pyro had thrown the door open. “Engineer—?”

It took her far too long to understand what she was seeing. A humming dispenser stained red stood half-opened a few yards from the door, its inner workings exposed with wires leading out of it to a silver box on the floor. It seemed familiar. There was a something slumped over the dispenser, too, vast-shouldered and unmoving. Something else, something smaller, lay in a wet heap by the silver box. That was familiar, too, much more so than the box, but it was—it was wrong. It was too red. It was saturated with red, utterly red and sitting in a pool of more and more red. What was it? She couldn’t look away, she couldn’t even—

—no, she knew where she had seen this before. On the field, many times, with Soldier or Demoman. Their explosives had a way of blowing things up in gruesome ways that made them both laugh like hyenas, and only a week ago Pyro had been jogging to keep up with Demo as he backed up from a sticky trap. She had been too slow—he set it off as the REDs rounded the corner, and the concussive blast had knocked her face-first into the snow. The REDs’ screams still rocketed about in her ears, but most of what she remembered was lifting her head to find a hand unattached to an arm lying in front of her. It was missing three fingers and gushing blood, still twitching.

Pyro watched the hand in front of the dispenser, watched a slow, fat bead of red form over the severed bone. This wasn’t right. This shouldn’t be here, here in Engineer’s workshop, it should be out on the battlefield, in the snow, waiting to vanish into respawn like always. As the drop of blood dripped down to the pool beneath it, Pyro couldn’t stem the low, breathless sort of gasp that rushed out of her. At the sound of her voice, the something on the dispenser lifted its head. “Wh …?” it croaked, and it sounded like Engineer.

 

 

Pyro nearly tripped over herself running to him, giving the red thing on the ground a wide berth and skidding to a halt as near to his side as she dared. A shudder trailed down her spine and she finally thought to check the rest of the room. A panicky scan revealed it was empty, but she was very unarmed. If the RED spy was still here, she was defenseless. A few yards away on the workbench, though, there was a shotgun. Maybe she could—

—next to her, Engineer took a haggard, stuttering breath. “Micah?”

“What?” Pyro said, ripping her gaze away from the shotgun to get a look at him. She was close enough to the dispenser now that it had reached out to her. She barely registered that its beam was not its usual blue, but white.

“Damn it,” Engineer said. His voice was metal grinding against itself. “Damn it, you’re … the hell’re you doin’ here. I told you to get.”

“I—I’m not going to just—”

“It ain’t safe, boy,” he muttered, pushing himself up on his elbows. His gaze was drifting, sometimes on her, sometimes somewhere very far away. “What’re you, ain’t you about fourteen? Fourteen got no place on the oil fields, son, it, you’ll get dead quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. S, saw a man get crushed under a pipe just last week. Just like that …”

He wasn’t in the workshop, Pyro realized. He was somewhere else, somewhere in his own head. Somewhere like where she had been many times. Dumbstruck, she watched in growing horror as he lifted his right hand.

His arm was dyed brilliant crimson straight down to the elbow, and now it ended at the wrist. A huge cuff of metal clamped down on his flesh like teeth, and beyond that bristled more metal still, smaller. Delicate and articulated. They spasmed, twitching, malfunctioning. It wasn’t a hand. It looked like a hand, but it wasn’t one. It was stained and glistening wet and red in the workshop’s buzzing lights and it was not a hand at all.

Engineer looked at it, frowned, and stared down into the dispenser. “I’m … I’m forgettin’ something.”

Reaching out with his other hand—his real hand—he flicked the power switch. The dispenser thunked and shut down. “There,” he said, right as Pyro realized all her fingers had gone numb. He started digging around the machine’s insides with the mechanical thing, muttering. “I just got … I got to swap out the …”

“E—Engineer, no, don’t move, okay? Just don’t move. I’m going to get Med—”

Engineer pulled his arm out of the machine, staring at the metal thing that was not a hand. In a matter of seconds his expression began to twist into agony. “No,” he said. “that, that ain’t right. Turn—turn it back on. Turn it back on, Micah, damn it t-turn it back—”

That was all he got out before whatever the dispenser had been giving him wore off entirely. With a guttural howl his body gave out and he crumpled to the ground, taking the machine with him. It made a vicious crunch as it hit the ground. Startled into action, any action, anything, Pyro scrambled for the power switch again. It took her an eon to find it, and when she finally did and threw it back on, nothing happened.

Her hands—cold, slimy with blood, the feeling slowly creeping back into them, they were real, her hands were still fine—her hands trembled. Engineer lay writhing on the ground, clutching his arm, his screams shattering any thought that came to her. What was she supposed to do? Should she go for help? Should she—

Her eyes fell on the shotgun again.

Pyro stumbled toward it and pulled it off the workbench. Its heft and weight poured relief through her veins and at once she felt her hands begin to steady. She cracked it open and found a single round. That would do. She would only need one shot. It snapped together with a sharp click and she rounded on Engineer.

He had pushed himself up on his real hand but got no further, panting like a dog. He was as white as snow, patches of him smeared red, and his eyes seemed out of focus as Pyro pointed the barrel square at his face. His gaze ran up the length of the shotgun until it found Pyro’s mask, and lingered there.

He said something. A question, maybe. It kind of sounded like her name. It was too slurred for her to make out. Her finger curled around the trigger.

Engineer repeated himself, a pained half-smile on his face. “Told you not to trust me, didn’t I?”

As soon as the words had left his mouth, his eyelids fluttered. His arm gave way as he passed out at her feet. The gun slipped from Pyro’s hands (shaking, shaking again) to join him seconds later.

She turned and bolted out the door, down the halls, bawling for Medic.

 

* * *

 

Medic had come, of course. He brought half the team with him to see what the screaming was about. When she led them to the workshop it was sort of a relief to see them all as shocked by Engineer and his hand as she was.

Pyro left while they were arguing over whether or not to respawn him. Instead she got her flare gun and headed outside, toward the black remains of the barn. She sat down in the rubble, now coated lightly with snow, and fired flares off at nothing until her hands were too cold to pull the trigger anymore. Then she put her head on her knees and didn’t think about anything. It was only when the cold began to creep into her bones and make her muscles shake that she ventured back inside.

The base was quiet now. She shuffled past the canteen and commons and only saw Soldier and his hen. The prospect of asking either of them what had happened wasn’t appealing. Instead she walked until she found herself on the far side of the base, at a room she had forgotten about, a room with Medic’s voice drifting from it. “… have asked me, you know. I would have been delighted to assist.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Engineer.

“It would be trivial to respawn you and do the procedure properly! Probably. What was it you were saying about that contraption and respawn?”

“Nothin’,” said Engineer. “Just drop it.”

He sounded … better. Pyro wondered who Micah was.

The door she had been eavesdropping behind flew open. Pyro stumbled backwards, and Medic peered down at her. “Ah, you did show up. I suppose you have also come to see the amazing mechanical man.”

“Uh—”

“Of course you have! Very well, go. Do not touch anything. I will return shortly and then I want both of you out, the owls are terrified.” That was all. The doctor took off down the hall, leaving the door open as he strode off with purpose. Pyro watched him go, delaying the inevitable. When he was out of sight she braced herself, and crossed the infirmary threshold.

She remembered this place. Or at least, she had impressions of it. Divining solid memories from the trainwreck of the last few years was an exercise in frustration and headaches, she had learned almost at once. But the mildew-and-antiseptic smell hanging in the air was familiar enough that it only made her wrinkle her nose instead of gag. There was no sign of any owls. There was, however, Engineer, sitting on a gurney and watching her with no particular expression. Pyro opened the mask. “Hey.”

Engineer grunted.

This was going great already. Pyro shifted her weight from one leg to the other, hooking her thumbs in her belt loops. “You—look better.”

“Mmm.”

“Your, uh. Your … hand—”

“What the hell do you want, Pyro?”

A sharp twinge of irritation snapped at her. She swallowed it down, tilted her head up toward the ceiling for a moment, and said, “I just … want to talk.”

Engineer snorted, sliding off the gurney. His hand—the fake one, the metal one—was still there, she realized with a start. It clanged against the gurney as he touched it. “That so?” he said. “Thought you were wishin’ you were back to where you couldn’t talk.”

“Oh, come on—”

“No, don’t you ‘come on’ with me, sweetheart, I damn well meant it when I said I’m done with you and your bull—”

“I’m trying to apologize!”

Everything went still. Engineer gave her a good, hard look, expression now locked in a scowl. Slowly, he folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against the gurney. “Apologize?” he repeated. “ _You_?”

Pyro could feel the old throb settling between her temples. She pressed her fingers to her head and inhaled, trying to focus on the way the air flowed down her ragged throat instead of the rising pain. “I’m—yeah. I … had a lot of time to think. And I thought about it, and you’re … you were right.” When she looked up she was met with Engineer staring her down, unmoved. She swallowed and tried again. “About me, I mean. And I didn’t mean what I said about—about all that. Not really. I was scared, and hungover, and—”

“Sure sounded like you meant it at the time.”

“Can I finish my sentence?” she said. “Please?”

He made a _get on with it_ sort of gesture with his metal hand. It made an eerie creak as it moved. Nothing in his face had changed.

Pyro slumped back against the wall and exhaled. “I just wanted to tell you that you were right. About me. And I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “That’s it.”

She could feel his eyes, dissecting and analyzing everything about her. To call it uncomfortable was an understatement, and the silence dragged painfully on. Pyro broke first. She cleared her throat and asked, “What happened with your hand?”

He was slow to answer, looking down at the metal that gripped his arm. “Cut it off,” he said. “Put on a better one. You should know. You were there, the way I heard it.”

“Sort of. All I did was find you. You thought I was someone named Micah.”

“Micah—?” His brow furrowed. He glanced toward the dingy window, where the sun was starting to touch the horizon. “I don’t remember that.”

“Do you … remember any of it?”

“Not after the dispenser got going, really, no.”

“Oh.” She fidgeted, picking through what she could remember of the scene. “That was wired up to something weird, too.”

“External supply. Easier than changing things in and out all the time. Had a numbing agent in it. Meant to swap in the regular stuff after everything was connected.”

“I didn’t know you could switch them out like that.”

“Oh, you can,” said someone behind her. Pyro nearly jumped out of her skin and whirled to see Medic, squinting at her. His eyes cut up to Engineer. “And I’m sure Herr Engineer is normally quite proficient at it.”

He swept past her, into the room, and held up and arm. A moment later a white owl swooped down from a high cubby among the shelves and landed on his wrist without a sound. “There you are,” Medic cooed, stroking its head. Without looking at either Pyro or Engineer, he made a shooing motion at them. “Your time is up. Go on, have your emotions elsewhere, please. Out!”

Engineer muttered something, pushing himself off from the gurney. Pyro turned tail and slunk out before he could catch up with her.

 

* * *

 

“Stop.” Heavy put out his hand (real, flesh, huge and heavily calloused). Pyro stopped before she could make her next move. “You have missed a foundation.”

She blinked, looking down at the cards arranged on the table. “Oh. Damn, yeah.” The six of spades on the table had completely escaped her notice, and she had tried to add the seven of spades in her hand to the wrong pile. Zank-patience was a game that required more attention than she had tonight.

Him catching her mistake meant her turn was over. Leaning back in her chair, she huffed softly and waited for Heavy’s move. Sitting around and playing cards like a normal human being felt bizarre, but she’d take it. “So, anyway, yeah. I mean—he didn’t tell me to screw off and die, so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time.”

After escaping the infirmary she had run into Heavy almost immediately. He must have been able to tell something was up—or else he simply needed another player. Either way they had wound up in the empty canteen, though the “empty” part would change soon the closer it got to dinnertime. She supposed she should start coming to meals again anyway.

Pyro picked at a sliver of a hole in the oak table as Heavy lay down three cards, and paused with a fourth in his hand. “Why did you apologize to him?” he asked.

She glanced up at him blinking. “What do you mean?”

He lay the fourth card down on one of Pyro’s stacks and she grimaced. The move had rigged her next turn. “You said he lied to you, yes?”

“Well, yeah.” Pyro puffed out her cheeks under the mask and let the air out of the open filter in a slow sigh. “But I got so … I told him I wished he’d killed me instead.” She drew her next card as he gestured it was her turn. Nine of hearts. “That’s a fucked-up thing to say, I think, isn’t it?”

Her teammate made a ponderous kind of rumble in answer as she tried to figure out which card to put down where. “I mean,” she continued, “I’m still pissed off. And I still think he should have just told me. But I don’t know what else I could have done.”

She picked her way through her next play and managed to drop a few cards without error this time. When she passed to Heavy, she added, “What happened after I left?”

“Mmm. Not much. We take him to infirmary, Doktor fixes him. When he is awake again he is talking nonsense, but he said that he wants the hand to stay, he did not want the respawn.” Heavy shook his head, looking at his cards. “I have never seen him like this until this mission. This place, it has done something to him. It has become very bad—he is like the wolf that bites his own leg off to escape the trap.”

Pyro could not help herself. “Literally.”

Heavy lifted his eyes to squint at her, then snorted.


	24. 22: Mouth

### 22\. "put your money where your mouth is"
    
    
    1. _he should put his money where his mouth is and prove he's not all talk_ ; to do something rather than to talk about it.

 

* * *

 

It was interesting to be able to see her own behavioral patterns after finally realizing they were there. Pyro watched herself go right back to avoiding Engineer the very next day, and the day after that. And he wasn’t even the worst thing she was running from.

“ _Move_ , willya, God g’wan get outta the way why are you so frickin’ slow?”

Scout shouldered past her through the narrow hallway that led out from their second point. The motion shoved her against the wall and she glared at his back as he bolted ahead before picking up her own pace. The fighting had moved back to the middle point, though as of her last life they had not yet lost the territory.

As she broke out into the field, the crack of a scattergun reached her ears. Swerving right, she rounded the outside corner of the garage in time to see Scout jam his weapon against the RED spy’s collarbone and fire. Gore splattered the snow. Scout’s crowing laughter joined the echoes of the gun’s report, and he was gone again before the body even hit the ground.

Once he had left, Pyro trotted forward and nudged the spy with the muzzle of her flamethrower. He did not move. She made a circle around him, puffing fire here and there. When nothing and no one caught flame, she followed where Scout had gone.

The BLU mercenaries had cleared out their enemies. Half the team was up in the skeleton house—Sniper crouched at the broken window with jar in hand, Medic bounding around like an excited puppy, Soldier perched on the remains of the roof and screaming something that sounded like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The blue glow of a teleporter by the dispenser and miniature sentry finished the group, Engineer was nowhere to be seen. She checked the corners for the RED spy anyway, though out of habit or duty she was not sure.

A moment later Soldier careened off the shingles and nearly landed on her. “HELLO, CADET!” he bellowed, slapping her on the back. “I have intimidated the enemy with only my voice, like the majestic American lion!”

“That’s—that’s great.”

“It is not just ‘great’! It is PATRIOTIC and BEAUTIFUL,” Soldier said, beaming. Before Pyro could do anything else he had wrapped his hand around her shoulder-strap. “We are charging now! ATTACK!”

“Soldi—!”

Too late. He was already dragging her through the snow, moving at a surprising clip for being burdened with both his rocket launcher and her. Eventually she got her feet under her, and by then they were in the mouth of RED’s garage. Soldier charged right up the ramp to the platform that overlooked their point. Pyro gave chase, beating him to the top, only to be met with that sound that made her stomach drop and her head reel. _BE-BEEP._

She backpedaled hard as the sentry locked on her, hit something, and scrambled behind it even as a searing pain shot through her leg. Holes had been clipped through her boot and pant leg, and she bared her teeth as she watched the blood start to ooze. The thick metal barrels she had sheltered behind echoed as she slumped back against them, gathering herself. Where was Soldier?

Her question was answered when he howled a challenge from behind another set of barrels further down the ramp, and then there was nothing but the incredible boom of rocket after rocket filling the air. She couldn’t hear herself think. Not brave or stupid enough to charge a sentry, she scrambled back down the ramp and started limping back toward mid, hoping RED wouldn’t catch her crippled.

As the house came back into view she realized the scene had changed dramatically in the few minutes she and Soldier had been gone. It was deserted, leaving only the machine nest. The teleporter was no longer spinning. The sentry’s muzzle drooped. The RED spy was leaning against the dispenser, a cigarette between his fingers, and across from him Engineer stood with his arms folded across his chest, staring fixedly at him.

This was the last thing she would remember upon respawning.

She fell back flat on her ass, dizzy, nauseous. She didn’t bother trying to stand again at first, trying to rearrange her shattered memories. Engineer and the spy had been talking again. She hadn’t seen the spy since before Christmas, not outside of the usual fighting. What did he want now?

But she had to get up eventually. When her balance returned she dragged herself over to the lockers to pick through her weapons. In her cubby there were no fewer than four kinds of flare guns, two sledgehammers, and three varieties of axe. She hadn’t been sure where any of them came from, the first time she’d seen them, just that they were all familiar and the weight of each one felt good in her hands. For some time she just stood blinking at them, wondering which would be the least likely to get her killed.

Behind her, the respawn doors slid open with a smooth, mechanical hum.

Pyro turned in time to see Scout stumble out, looking sick. When he noticed she was there he straightened up at once, chest puffing as he gave her a _what are you looking at?_ sort of glare before joining her at the lockers—his directly beside hers. What luck.

For what felt like a long time she just stayed stiff and watched him rifle through his guns and a frankly terrifying assortment of melee weapons, trying to decide what to do. She had to do _something_ , after all, soon or later. Might as well make it now. She popped the mask filter.

“Sorry about the other day.”

Scout stopped dead. He turned his head as slowly as a millstone to stare at her with bulging eyes. Pyro kept her gaze forward, on her locker. “’Scuse you?”

“When I slammed your hand in the door and freaked out. I’m sorry.”

He gaped at her a second longer, then spat out an incredulous laugh. “You’re _sorry_ ,” he said. “Am I hearin’ this, I ain’t hearin’ this. Pyro’s sayin’ sorry, Pyro’s actin’ like a real live human bein’, it’s goddamn Revelations! End of the world right here! Shee-yit, pal, y’know what I dunno if I even wanna hear this shit outta you, sorry nothin’, you did a lot more than just, just slam my hand in the door, hell, man, between you an’ Engie I gotta say I’m real frickin’ sick’a you—”

She turned to him, slinging her flamethrower up over her shoulder. Miracle of miracles, he fell silent. A grimace soured his face as his eyes darted all over her mask, as if trying to pierce it through to her expression. Pyro tried to remember if she’d ever seen him smile at her. Not likely. Not ever likely.

“I need to talk to you about something,” she said.

“Talk to me, whaddya m …” He drifted off. His stare sharpened. “Talk to me about what?”

From where she stood, Pyro could just see over Scout’s shoulder, to the glass doors of the respawn block. As Scout spoke two things that had not been in the room a moment ago began to move: Medic took deep, gasping breaths, hand on his head, and Demoman leaned over onto his knees, white-knuckled. “Hey,” Scout snapped, voice a little less steady than she was used to, “hey, asshole, answer me, what?”

“Something important. Not here. Tonight. After dinner, outside the garage.”

“Outside, what’re, what’re you freakin’ crazy—”

Oh, God, almost certainly.

Pyro turned and made for the door before she could think about what she had just set in motion.

 

* * *

 

This was the stupidest thing Pyro had ever done, and that was saying something. There was also the distinct chance it might be the last thing she would ever do. That would be the real joke, wouldn’t it?

Night had fallen. The ridges in the iced-over garage door she now leaned against dug into her back even through her suit and layers of clothing, and above her its yellow glowing light made everything outside its short reach seem unreal, especially with the slow way the snow was falling. She had been out here nearly half an hour now, having foregone dinner entirely. No appetite. Nerves.

She wanted a cigarette. The pack she had gotten at Miut had vanished, and she wasn’t sure if she had smoked them all or lost them. Either way she didn’t have any now, and it was the only thing she could think of that might have calmed her down.

Why was she doing this? All her reasoning felt like it had vanished. She took a deep breath and stopped mid-inhale, frowning. The air tasted acrid, like smoke. It only doubled her craving and she gnawed at her lip, glancing around to see if Scout had arrived. Nowhere, but maybe he was at the little door around the corner. Pushing off the garage door, she eased into the darkness, sniffing the air. Scout wasn’t around the corner, but the smell was only getting stronger. She checked the other side of the garage, just in case, but there was nothing there either. When she turned again to the pool of light, she froze.

The ghost tapped ash from his Newport. He blinked at her, patient, and shifted his weight. Snow in his hair drifted down to his shoulders when he moved. It was a remarkably convincing illusion.

Pyro swallowed, watching him.

 

 

“So,” he said after a long, long time, and leaned back against the garage, exactly where she had been standing. When she looked him in the face it was all there, the arch of his nose and the way his mouth was curved into a specific pitying smile, but if she closed her eyes and tried to remember what he looked like she couldn’t find the details. He crossed his arms. “This your big plan?”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“You forget what happened last time?”

“No,” she said. “And this is the last time I’m going to talk to you.”

The ghost shrugged. Pyro heard crunching snow as someone rounded the corner to the garage.

Scout, all narrowed eyes and hunched shoulders, buried in a wool coat, stopped at the edge of the light. For some ten seconds they looked at one another silently. He crossed his arms. “So I’m here,” he said when she did not speak. “What am I here for?”

Pyro looked back at the ghost. He was gone, and she wasn’t sure if she felt relieved or abandoned.

 

* * *

 

Through the unfiltered mask Pyro said, “I’m going to tell you a story.” Before Scout could scoff at him (a story, a _story_ , what the hell, had this guy really dragged him outside in ten-below weather for a freaking fairy-tale?), he added, “And you need to let me tell the whole thing before you do anything.” Pyro hesitated. “Then you can—you can do whatever you want.”

Scout felt his lip curl. He didn’t have time for this, and it was too damn cold and dark and snowing even more besides. Why had Pyro made him come out here for this? What did the freak even want? He’d liked it a lot better when the guy acted like a five-year-old.

But here he was in the snow anyway.

“Fine,” Scout said, stepping into the light and leaning against the garage door. “So start tellin’.”

“I mean it, Scout, the whole thing.”

“The whole thing, yeah, whatever, sure.”

Pyro fidgeted. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and looked down at the ground, and at last he began to talk in that warped, hoarse voice of his. “It’s a true story.” Beat. “It happened in a big city. In the summer. A while ago.”

“Fer chrissakes would you get on with it?”

He lifted his head, setting those black lenses on Scout. He was standing just outside the light, and the angle made his mask almost indistinguishable from itself apart from the white highlights on the eyes. “So … there was this … guy,” Pyro said. “Normal guy, nice … friendly. Too friendly, maybe, because one day he made friends with someone he shouldn’t have. A girl. This friend he made, she was screwed up. One time they were two feet from a car crash—a bad one—and she didn’t even care. But this guy, he kept talking to her. Maybe he thought he could fix her, or maybe—maybe he didn’t mind that her head wasn’t right.” Pyro shrugged and kicked at the snow. “Either way. What he didn’t know about her was that she was bad luck. Really bad luck. And one day when he was with her the bad luck came around.”

He paused for longer than seemed necessary. Scout was about to tell him to hurry up when he shook his head. “There was an accident. Like the car crash but worse. He died, and his friend, the girl, she ran away because she was a coward.”

“So what?”

“She went kind of crazy. She was crazy for a long time and got into a lot of trouble and she couldn’t ever get away from the bad luck because she kept making stupid decisions. Then she met this other guy. He didn’t know she was bad luck either. He tried to help her and he almost died too. But he worked for this … place that sort of specialized in crazy people, I think. And they found out about her, and they gave her a job.

“By then she couldn’t remember anything about the first guy. She blocked it out or something. But when she got to the new job there was—the guy who died had a brother, and it turned out the brother was working there. And suddenly she remembered everything again, and the bad luck came back. And she could have fixed it then, even so, but … she was a coward. She couldn’t do it. So she made another stupid decision, a really bad one, and it almost killed her. It made her crazy, and the crazy burned at her until there wasn’t anything left except for ashes for a long time”

Pyro’s voice had been getting softer the longer he spoke, and when he fell silent it was like he had silenced the whole world, too. Despite himself Scout couldn’t look away, something deep in him growing tenser with each word. A shiver ran down his back. He told himself it was the cold.

“But even though she was a coward and she was good at running, things still caught up with her,” Pyro continued. “She couldn’t run forever after all, and all she had done was make things worse. The only thing she hadn’t tried was … fixing things. So she—she decided to try that instead.”

The snow was getting heavier.

Scout stared at him, brow furrowed, trying to understand what he had just heard. There was something lurking under the story, something vast and horrible and black. A kind of buzzing sound started to fill up the back of his mind.

Pyro said, “The big city was Boston.”

Something in Scout’s head flatlined. He sputtered. “Wh, wait what do—”

“The company was the Builder’s League United. BLU. The brother was you.” He reached up as Scout’s mind desperately tried to keep up, and gripped the mask. The way it came off his head looked slow and painful. “And the girl who was bad luck, and a coward,” he said in a voice much different without the mask, “was me.”

Pyro stepped into the light.

Snow swirled around them. It batted at Scout’s nose and eyes, but he could not so much as blink. Every muscle in him was paralyzed, every ounce of strength he had to pour into just keeping himself upright against the reality of Pyro’s words—against the scarred face that looked back at him with such weariness it threatened to shatter him.

“You,” Scout said, so quietly the wind took the word as soon as it was out of his mouth. “ _You_ ,” he said again, and this time it tore its way across his lips like a bullet.

Pyro, hands knotted up in the empty rubber of the mask and her hair filling up with snow, nodded.

She waited.

Her mouth was dry as much from fear as it was from talking for so long. The January air was frigid on her damp skin and she wasn’t used to having to squint from light or from snowflakes. She wasn’t used to the bright blue of Scout’s eyes or the piercing, haunted way he was looking at her.

She waited. The only sound was the wind.

At last Scout turned away from her, still leaning on the garage door. All she could make out was the huge heave of his shoulders, and the fog coming from his mouth as he took breath after shaky breath. Pyro wished her heart would stop racing.

“I never meant to hurt him,” she said, daring to draw a few steps closer. Scout did not answer, nor did he move. “But the fire, that … that was my fault. It’s all my fault.” Still nothing. Pyro looked down at the snow again, at the mask crumpled in her hands. “I should have told you in the beginning. I’m sorry.”

Scout straightened up, as stiff and silent as the frozen landscape around them. When he turned back to her she caught only the briefest glimpse of his face: wild-eyed, mouth a flat slash across his face. His voice was raw and bloody when he spoke.

“You took his lighter.”

She had no answer.

The next thing she was aware of was a blur of motion, and then the explosive pain in her jaw as Scout’s fist snapped her head sideways.

She hit the snow a half-second before her mask did. On instinct she put her arms over her face, too dizzy for anything else, but the second blow never came. When her vision cleared she saw Scout pulling something out from under his coat. The familiar click of a safety coming off reached her ears. Pyro closed her eyes. In the next second Scout had dropped to his knees in the snow next to her, one hand pinning her to the ground and the other ramming his scattergun’s muzzle right up under her ribcage. At this range it would blow a hole right through her stomach. She could bleed for hours if Scout played it right.

When she opened her eyes again she found he was looking at her, like he had been waiting, like he wanted to see the look on her face as he pulled the trigger. And he pulled it.

The gun clicked.

Only clicked.

Scout’s eyes dropped down to the gun, and he tried again, pulling hard enough that the muzzle dug up against Pyro’s ribs as he did. She didn’t even have time to try and brace herself, but the gun just clicked again. She could see his grim composure falling apart, piece by piece.

_Hey, you been havin’ any trouble with your rifles?_

The world started to move again. She could feel Scout’s hand shaking right through the gun. A moment later he flung it at her face with a feral snarl. She yelped as it bounced off her cheekbone and dropped into the snow.

That was all that happened. On arms that felt like they would collapse at any moment Pyro pushed herself up to her elbows as Scout arose and turned away, back a few steps to the garage door. A metal bang rent the air as he slammed his fist against it. Once. Twice. He made a cry like a wounded animal and it echoed off the frozen metal, plaintive and broken.

Her heart felt like it would destroy itself with the speed it was pumping at. She fell twice before she managed to get to her feet. Scout stayed where he was. Once she was sure she would not fall again, Pyro’s gaze drifted to the churned snow.

To her left lay the mask. On the right was the scattergun. She looked back and forth between them, listening to the wind and what it did to the way Scout’s breathing seemed to be getting heavier and heavier.

God only knew if Scout even heard her when she came up to him a few seconds later. He was leaning against the garage door like nothing else in the world could ever hold him up again. The way the light fell on him highlighted his cheek just enough that she could see the damp streaks on his skin that had not been there a minute ago.

She had to say his name to get him to look at her, and when she held out the gun she had picked up before crossing to him, handle-first, he seemed not to register that he took it. Only when she stepped back a few paces to give him a clear shot did he return to reality. He looked down at the gun, and then back at her.

“I won’t try to run,” Pyro offered.

The gun had been trembling in Scout’s hands. Now it went very still. Everything went very still.

Then, as a truly vicious burst of wind broke the silence, Scout twisted on his heel. Snow kicked up behind him as he bolted back to the base, leaving Pyro alone with nothing but herself.


	25. 23: Throat

### 23\. “go for the throat”
    
    
    1. _given the opportunity he would always go straight for the throat_ ; to attack someone where they are weakest; to attack fiercely and without hesitation.

 

* * *

 

No one had seen Scout in over forty-eight hours.

He had not been to meals. He had even been skipping work, and he was nowhere to be found after hours either. It seemed to Pyro to be the only thing the team talked about after they realized he was missing.

For her, his vanishing was both a relief and a terror. If he was not around, he couldn’t jump her again—but neither could she be sure of where he was, or what he was going to do. She found she was skittish on the field, expecting a bat or a scattergun blast around every corner. If he attacked her again she was not sure if she would be able to take it with the same grace she had mustered before.

The story was the same the third day, and Pyro could feel the unease and unspoken questions in the air as the eight of them set out that morning. The tension was palpable. Sniper was missing most of his shots and she had watched Spy flub more than one backstab, and Engineer was insisting on using the mini-sentry instead of the standard one. Even when RED finally took mid back from them, forcing them to switch to defense, he refused to alter his strategy.

The team compensated. Heavy planted himself in the middle of the point, Medic at his back. Demo and Soldier took the right entrance, and Sniper and Engineer the left and center. Spy vanished somewhere, and that left Pyro clutching her flamethrower and darting all over the map, trying to cover anywhere that needed covered.

For an hour or so they seemed to be holding. Engineer’s tiny sentry did its job remarkably well, all things considered. Once while collapsed on the dispenser Pyro overheard him explaining to Sniper how his new hand made it possible for him to deploy the thing’s delicate mechanisms correctly. He sounded pleased with himself.

Like everything else good, it couldn’t last. Pyro happened to be square on the point when the crack of a rifle took Heavy’s head off his shoulders right in front of her. Medic nearly tripped over the heap of his body. Seconds later RED was pouring in like blood. Three grenades soared over Pyro’s head and she hardly had time to wince before the sound of exploding metal and shouting reached her. Turning, she saw Sniper stumbling back against the wall, the rifle falling from his hands and bleeding from a dozen pieces of shrapnel buried in his skin. Engineer was nowhere.

Medic shouted and she twisted in time to see the RED pyro barreling straight at them, axe in hand. The RED engineer was right on their tail. Before she could so much as brace herself for the blow, the pyro crumbled. Spy yanked his knife out of their back, his disguise broken.

He gave the pair of them a curt nod as he ran past, vanishing into thin air. In the next moment a bright, sharp taste filled Pyro’s mouth. As the medigun beam surged into her she saw something crimson moving in the corner of her vision. There were more of them coming.

“Pyro!” Medic barked over the rising sounds of gunfire and screaming. “Do you have ammo?” She gave him a thumbs-up. “Good! Get ready to use it!”

Before she could even wonder why he was asking, he threw a switch on the side of the nozzle.

In the days gone by since her restoration, Pyro had heard the word “übercharge” thrown around here and there, but never gathered its meaning. Not until a week ago. A series of screams and explosions coupled with laughter had drawn her attention as she stopped to reload her shotgun: Heavy and Medic, charging headlong into the enemy sentry nest. She would have sworn they were neon for how intense the blue medibeam glowed. Medic was cackling loudly enough she could hear him clear across the field, but he was not what she was staring at. No, that was Heavy. She watched the bullets bounce right off of him, or seem to, and when two rockets hit him full in the chest and left no mark she heard herself swear in shock. Under his minigun the sentry nest was reduced to rubble in seconds. All that remained of the enemy was red pools in the snow.

The über rushed through her veins like wildfire. A panicked gasp choked her as her heart began to bang against her ribcage. With it came a kind of froth, a blood-lust, a surge of impossible power. Behind her she could hear Medic telling her _go, go!_ , but she didn’t need the urging. Pyro leapt forward, howling, and crashed in among the approaching enemy like a wolf among sheep.

A screaming roar from her flamethrower turned the lot of them into a single blurry smear of flame. She emptied it onto the shrieking men, hurled it at one that was trying to flee, and then out came the old barbed-wire axe. The chemical high left her laughing hysterically as she chewed through four bodies like cotton candy, splattering the cement and snow with gore and guts.

When the last one fell she lifted her head in time to see the RED scout high-tailing it toward the middle point. With another burst of hyena laughter she scrambled over a still-burning corpse to give chase, only to have something grab her by the collar. She wrenched away and turned, swinging the axe at whatever was there in a blind rage.

The impact left her bones shaking, and when she tried to rip her axe back she slipped and fell backwards instead. As she scrambled to get back upright she had a chance to see what had stopped her: Medic, blood-splattered and grinning, pulling her axe off where a chip in its head had wedged against his saw. “Magnificent,” he said as she got up. “You are as effective under über as ever. Maybe more! I don’t think you’ve ever focused on more than one target before. But come, we must regroup while we can!”

He practically dragged her back to the point, and she let him. The adrenaline was fading as quickly as it had come, and her arms ached horribly. But Medic was right: there was not a single living RED left anywhere in sight. He trotted her over to where Engineer was building a new nest and let her fall onto the slowly-building dispenser. She welcomed it.

Soldier and Demo showed up a minute or two later, their faces and uniforms stained red and chattering to each other. The two of them kept her company on the dispenser for a short while, and Pyro listened to them compare kills as her strength returned. Eventually she pushed herself back up to her feet, testing her legs, and drew Soldier’s attention. “Pyro!”

She stopped short, glancing over at him only to find him giving her a stiff salute. “Smart job out there, son,” he said. “You’re a good soldier.”

“Bloody good,” Demo agreed.

Pyro shifted her weight, startled by the sudden praise. She managed an awkward “thanks” and then excused herself, loping off to collect her weapons from where she had left them by the bodies. When she returned to the dispenser, the two of them were gone, and Engineer was arming another mini-sentry in the dirt. He caught her watching him as he stiffly got back to his feet. His expression betrayed nothing. Pyro exhaled and stooped to refuel her flamethrower.

A moment later she was stilled by his voice. “Hey.” She glanced up. There was a sort of grim reluctance on his face now, and it took him an uncomfortably long time to finish his thought. “Nice work,” he grunted at last.

Then he turned, and started working on the teleporter.

 

* * *

 

A gray dusk lurked on the horizon as the siren blared the end of the day. Pyro let her flamethrower’s nose hit the churned snow and dropped back against the chain-link fence, breathing hard. Beside her Demoman relaxed, slinging his grenade launcher over his shoulder with a sigh. A hundred feet away, the RED soldier they had been playing a life-or-death game of explosive chicken with for the last five minutes threw them a mighty salute. Then he made a smart about-face and marched off toward his own base.

Demo chuckled. “Always does that, him. C’mon,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder, “did a good job today. Let’s get supper.”

He didn’t need to tell her twice. It had been a rough defense. Truthfully, she hadn’t realized how much Scout did for the team until he wasn’t there harrying and flanking and being a general nuisance to RED. Without him, taking back mid looked uncertain. BLU had kept their second point today, but just barely.

She kept pace with Demo as they made for the base, content to listen to his chatter between swigs of whiskey. She’d forgotten he drank like a fish on the field, to the point that a shattered bottle was his close-range weapon of choice more often than it wasn’t. How he did it mystified her. The hangover she’d gotten after Christmas had left her with no desire to drink again. When he offered her some she made an exaggerated gagging noise and mimed vomiting. He laughed, and then they had met up with the rest of the team. Demo stepped away from her, and suddenly she was next to Engineer. He looked as tired as she felt, and he said nothing to her, but the silence felt a little less painful than it had before.

Dinner passed uneventfully. Soldier had meal duty, and that meant rubbery Spam and undercooked potatoes. In her room, Pyro wolfed it down—she’d eaten much worse before she’d met Engineer, she could remember that—and wandered out to look for the team, not bothering to change out of her chemsuit. She had to break her isolationist habit sooner or later, she told herself. And frankly, there was safety in numbers. Scout was still missing.

Sans him, the entire team had congregated in the commons for the evening. Even Engineer was there, picking through a massive textbook in the equally-massive armchair. Things felt … normal, she thought, looking over the quiet room. By the window Spy and Sniper seemed to be bickering half-heartedly over something. Demo and Soldier had at some point produced an old television from somewhere, and were respectively messing with the rabbit-ears and grumbling at the static on the screen. Heavy sat at the couch in front of it, watching them with what she imagined was amusement. Very close to Engineer was the card table, still there from the Christmas party. Here Medic was seated, shuffling a deck of cards. A folding chair sat open by him, and before she entirely realized it Pyro had crossed to it and sat down.

Medic did not stop shuffling, but he did glance at her, raising an eyebrow. “Heavy tells me he has been teaching you zank-patience.”

“Yeah. A little.”

His eyes glittered. “Do you think you can beat me?”

 

* * *

 

When the sound started—familiar, yet wrong—it dragged Dell away from his book. He had to look over the whole room to realize what it was. It turned out to be right next to him.

Pyro, laughing softly.

Not the giggling he’d grown to hate, or the hysterics that had taken her in the grip of the übercharge today, but a real and genuine laugh. She was leaning on her arms on the card table Medic sat at, saying something indecipherable as Medic passed her a stack of cards. From the corner of his eye Dell watched her settle herself and rifle through her hand. All he could think of was the infirmary, of Pyro with her hands balled into white-knuckled fists, telling him he was right.

 _Well, when aren’t I?_ , he’d wanted to say. Even now something darker and colder than the Alaskan night gnawed at him. He hadn’t forgiven her. He didn’t want to, and that was the trouble. It bothered him. That wasn’t the kind of man he thought he was.

(Of course, once upon a time he hadn’t been the kind of man to poison someone over and over, either, or to do any of the other things he’d told himself were necessary in trying to bring her back. All things she still didn’t know he’d done to her, and never would, thanks to respawn.)

Things changed, he decided grimly.

His right arm twinged with pain and he winced, distracted. Sucking in his breath through his teeth, he put down his book and turned his new hand, putting pressure on his forearm to try and soothe it. After a few seconds the pain dulled. He exhaled. It was the cold hurting him, he was sure. Once he was out of here he’d be fine. The machinery moved as naturally as his real hand ever had, a true marvel, and yet if he’d wanted those steel fingers could have crushed bone without much effort, or pulled the wings off a gnat with perfect precision. It was as beautiful as it was fascinating, and for a long few seconds he simply admired the joints and wires.

A few feet away, Pyro said something he couldn’t quite make out. The fingers snapped into a knife-edged fist. Dell studied it. He wasn’t sure if he’d meant to do that.

He picked up his book again, trying to shake off the cloud looming over him. As he did, something moved in the commons doorway. He lifted his head to look.

When Scout came into the room he did so in complete silence. Not even the floor creaked under him. He looked skinnier than Dell remembered, somehow. His shirt was wrinkled and sweat-stained, and discolored bruises painted the hollows under his eyes. There was something … off about the way he carried himself.

The rusting cleaver from the kitchen wall dangled loosely in his right hand.

“Scout?” Dell said, but his gaze was fixed on the cleaver. At the sound of his voice everyone in the room looked up.

Scout dragged his eyes over to Dell with what seemed like gargantuan effort. He wet his cracked lips and swallowed audibly, and then set his sights on Pyro. Pyro, who had met his gaze, who was gripping the cards so tightly they had bent.

The two of them stared at one another as if nothing else in the world was real.

It was with an agonizing slowness that Pyro let the creased cards flutter to the table and got to her feet. She turned to him, one hand locked around the back of her chair like she would collapse without it. After another long, painful few seconds, she raised the other like a white flag.

Scout’s fingers contracted around the cleaver so fast as to make it seem to leap up in his grip. His jaw set. Quick as thought his whole body twisted and Dell barely had time to recognize it for what it was—a pitcher’s stance, the one Scout had bragged about and shown off a hundred thousand times. The wind-up.

The throw as his arm whipped forward.

It was artful. His aim was perfect.

 

 

The cleaver sunk into the space between Pyro’s lenses with an ugly, wet thump.

A scream shattered the silence, so abrupt and loud Dell thought he would go deaf. It nearly drowned out the crash as Pyro fell back against the card table. Scout was upon her before she had even made contact with it.

It all happened in less than ten seconds, and Dell had a front-row seat to the whole thing. Scout ripped the cleaver out and Pyro shrieked again, kicking, scrabbling, breaking off into throttled frothy gagging when he buried it in the side of her neck. When the blade rose up again she had gone silent and limp, and now Scout was the one screaming, unintelligible and choked. Someone else in the room shouted something. He swung.

An ear-piercing metallic screech silenced him. His head jerked up, lip curled into a hideous snarl. Pyro’s blood splattered his cheek and neck. Dell, not sure when he’d gotten out of his chair, not sure when he’d begun breathing so hard, stared back. When Scout tried to tear the cleaver out of his grip, Dell wrapped the unfeeling fingers of his right hand as tight around the rusted blade as they would go and twisted his wrist. The cleaver shattered.

High, agonized wails broke the tension. Scout’s head snapped around to stare down at Pyro again, the fury in his eyes vivid and unearthly. He shoved Dell with his shoulder, hard enough that Dell lost his breath and fell to the ground. Scout flung the cleaver handle at him blindly, and then he had his hands wrapped around Pyro’s gushing neck.

Winded and dumbstruck, Dell couldn’t get to his feet, but by then Heavy had arrived. He grabbed Scout around the upper arms and pulled, and in the side of his vision Dell could see Demo and Soldier rushing toward them. Scout was still raging even as they all three took hold of him, dragging Pyro along with him by her shredded mask, his voice growing more hysterical by the second:

“ _Let go!_ Let go’a me I’ll kill her, I’m going to kill her  _let me fucking go you hear me you goddamn bitch_ **_I’ll fucking kill you!_ ** ”

As his teammates finally pulled him off of her, Dell watched with mute horror as Scout’s death-grip on the mask yanked it off of her head. He did not let go of it even as he was hauled howling from the room, and it oozed blood the whole way.

The next thing Dell was aware of was Medic blocking his vision, stripping off his white coat. He got only the briefest glimpse of Pyro’s exposed face before Medic pressed the cloth to her wounds: more blood than skin, and a flash of what could only be bone. She was utterly still, though her sobs turned into strangled shrieks that died quickly when Medic applied pressure.

Down the hall, Dell could hear Demo and Soldier’s voices joining in with Scout’s. Heavy had left them at the door to return to Medic. “Pyro is …?”

“Still alive,” Medic said, businesslike. “But not for long. Pick him up, it will be quicker to heal him than letting him bleed out.” He glanced up at Heavy. “Unless you—?”

Heavy had already begun to gather her into his arms before Medic could finish his thought. Without another word they had whisked her out of the room.

Somewhere behind him, Dell could hear Sniper and Spy shifting in their seats. For his part, he just stared down at the shattered, bloody remains of the cleaver.

 

* * *

 

A long minute passed. Dell picked himself up. Eventually, Sniper said, “Guess that mess’s got to be cleaned up, if the bloke’s not respawning.”

Spy wrinkled his nose. Dell looked good and hard at the dark puddle before muttering something about towels and heading for the door. He couldn’t be there any longer.

Out he went, carefully avoiding the trails of blood in the threshold (one leading toward the infirmary, the other toward the neglected back of the base). He made his way to the showers and loaded up on towels, trying and failing to keep his mind blank. The attack kept replaying itself before his eyes as he walked back toward the commons, taking a roundabout path that would delay his return. Even when he succeeded, other things he would have preferred to forget filled the void.

_Tell … tell Scout that … can you apologize to Scout for me? I didn’t, I never got to … I …_

He shook himself and turned the corner. A bellow interrupted any other thought he may have had. “—FRIENDLY FIRE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED ON THIS TEAM! WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF HONOR? WHERE IS—”

“Solly, can it, willya—Scout, you ain’t makin’ sense—”

One of the empty storage rooms was no longer empty. Dell slowed outside it and watched the dark shapes behind the frosted glass, two standing, one sitting.

A new voice spoke, so raw and warped that it took Dell a few startled seconds to put together that it was Scout’s. “I ain’t gotta explain myself to you none, it ain’t none of your business, this got nothin’ t’do with you it got nothin’ to do with the team neither this, this is between me and Pyro, got it, me and her, fuck, that psycho fucking twisted bitch I’m—”

“Lad, look—”

“—gonna kill her d’you fuckin’ hear me, that, that fuckin’ murderer, I’ll burn her up with her own fire I’ll make her go through exactly what she did to him I’ll—”

“Scout,” Demo snapped, “what did you bloody mean that Pyro killed your brother?”

“I mean she _fucking murdered him!_ ” Scout snarled back, loud and high enough to make Dell’s ears ring. “I mean she burned my brother alive and she took his fucking lighter for a trophy and I’ve been working with that shit-stain all this time and I’m going to _kill her!_ ”

 

* * *

 

Once the blood was taken care of and Spy and Sniper had made for the infirmary, Dell went straight to bed. Sleep sounded like the only sane option, even in the face of the ten-dozen questions now clawing at his brain.

Of course this meant sleep never came. He tried to put himself under through pure willpower for about half an hour before sighing, sitting up, and getting dressed.

The halls were deserted when he made his way to Pyro’s room and knocked on the door. No answer. Surely she wasn’t still in the infirmary? He tried the handle, and to his surprise it turned. The door swung open into darkness. The moon filtered in through the single high window, highlighting the empty bed.

She was not here, and he should not have been. He flicked the light on anyway, squinting as his eyes adjusted. The place had changed. Of course it had changed, everything changed. None of the old Pyro’s things remained. There was nothing taped to the walls, no strange or macabre knickknacks tucked in the corners. The only thing that had stayed the same was the hoard of lighters lined up on the dresser, and the distinct smell of smoke and butane lingering in the air. Not even her flamethrower was here, and in truth that shocked him more than anything else. Come to think of it, he hadn’t even seen Shark since Pyro had built her new weapon. A peculiar sort of nostalgia came over him, unbidden.

Things changed.

He shut off the light and closed the door, but not quickly enough. Unwanted memories brought on by Pyro’s room skittered out of it to tail him as he moved through the dim hallways. Here was where Pyro had slammed into him, Scout racing after. That was the window she used to stop and draw things on with her finger, and next to that was the door to his workshop and everything that had happened in there in the last few months. Had he gone left instead of right at the next split he would have found himself in the garage, where Pyro had nearly caught him in conference with the RED spy at Christmas. And beyond that lay the silent, snowy field, where he had watched his scarf blow away into the trees, where he had broken all his contracts and personal codes to engage with the enemy. To bring back the arsonist.

Before he was sure he even wanted to go there, Dell found himself clear across the base, steps away from the infirmary entrance. He had not known what he expected, but a dark giant leaning up against the green double doors was not it. “Heavy?”

The giant stirred. “… Ah,” Heavy said, blinking down at him in the half-darkness. “Engineer.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds. Dell could feel himself being dissected, analyzed. “Hey,” he tried after a few unnerving seconds of this. “I ah. I was wonderin’ …”

“You are here to see Pyro.”

“I—I guess I am. Yeah. What’re you doin’ here?”

“I am guard. This is the only way into the medical room, unless you are bird.”

“Guard? Why—because of Scout?” Heavy nodded. Dell dropped his hands into his pockets, letting out a slow breath. “Almighty.”

“Soldier and Demoman, they have been keeping the eye on him. But I am here also. He is too fast, you know?”

Dell shrugged. “So, Pyro … Pyro really still in there—?”

“She is sleeping,” Heavy said. _She._ “But yes.” Before Dell could even open his mouth again, Heavy had stepped aside and opened the door. Dell gave him a nod and murmured thanks, and stepped inside.

A single pale light kept the night from the room, a desk lamp on one of the steel tables. It was weak but steady, and it took Dell a moment to find what he was looking for among the shadows. Ah, there. On the same gurney he himself had woken upon just days before. A prone figure lay on it, small and blurry with the darkness.

He only realized her bloodied suit and shirt had been stripped off and lain on the foot of the gurney after he had drawn close enough to hear her breathing. Beneath the thin sheet covering her he could just make out a ratty sports bra and jeans. She lay still but for the rise and fall of her chest, whole and unharmed—as whole as she got, anyway. Blood still discolored her skin and its collection of scars, but the wounds had healed. The apathy of sleep had blanked out her expression, and her hair was shorter than he remembered. But then, it had been a while since he’d last seen her face, hadn’t it?

Someone was beside him. “She was not herself when Doktor finished,” Heavy said. Dell turned his head to see his teammate gazing down at Pyro, too. ”She had turned back into the baby Pyro. It is the fear that does this, yes?”

“… You know about that?”

“She has told me what has happened to her. Or, some of it. Her life has been very strange.” Heavy shook his head, leaning back against one of the implement-strewn tables. It shifted a few inches under his weight, the legs squealing. Both he and Dell went still as Pyro stirred and grimaced, but she did not wake.

Dell rubbed at one eye, mulling over the vast tide of revelations that had finally broken the dam that night. “Did she come back out of it?”

“No. Doktor made her sleep. No dreams, he said. Hopefully she will be better in the morning.”


	26. 24: Bones

### 24\. "a skeleton in the closet"
    
    
    1. _she has too many skeletons in her closet for me;_ a secret, often shocking or incriminating.

 

* * *

 

Pyro dreamed.

She was in water, and the water pulled on her like a black hole, irresistible. Rain rolled off the sides of the vast bridge above her, trying to force her under the churning surface to where the old green car lay. She could only make out its still-lit headlights and the bubbles of oxygen escaping it as it settled on the sea floor a hundred miles below. There was no shore in sight. There was nothing to save her.

Amid gasps and choked sobs she tried to wipe the water from the lenses of her mask, her legs thrashing to keep her afloat. A wave thundered over her and threw her under, knocking the air straight out of her lungs. She forced her way back up gagging, salt water gushing from her mouth. The bridge was just a towering black shape above her, and below all that remained of the car was a quickly dimming glow.

Another wave dragged her down and the water shot up into her mask, filling up her mouth and nostrils. In one final bid for survival she reached up to pull the mask off. It peeled at her touch, like tar, the plastic stripping away in stringy black pieces that stuck to her fingers and face. It was stuck fast to her hair but by now that hardly mattered. She ripped off as much as she could, and it took her skin and her scars with it as the ocean washed it away. Even her clothes got stuck to it, and by the time she was free she was naked in the water, and the rain had stopped.

The water tugged at her one final time and then ceased. Her next kick struck something solid that had not been there before, something smooth. It floated up beneath her, discolored green metal, and as she scrabbled for a hold on the car’s roof she watched in awe as the ocean begin to drain out from under it. It seeped away into the sand that had not been there a moment ago, and what water had been left in the car rushed out the lone open window in the back seat.

She looked around. The bridge was gone, and the ocean had been replaced by the Badlands, or something very like them. The car’s roof grew hot under her bare skin, and at last she slipped down to the ground, on the same side as the open window, with her back to the car.

Something would be in the car when she turned around. The certainty of the thought was irrefutable. It took her a long time to look. When she did it took her even longer to realize she was looking at herself.

It wasn’t her, of course. Just someone like her. Pyro looked her up and down and she sat patiently, watching her from behind the lenses of the mask on her head. The colors of her asbestos suit seemed brighter, richer. At last, though, her dopplegänger pulled the mask off. All the scars Pyro had finally escaped were there as permanently as ever. The double glanced down at the mask, and then held it out to her.

Pyro grimaced, leaning back. “No. I don’t want it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But I just got rid of it!”

“I know,” the double sighed.

Frustration tore at her, swelling up her throat and dampening her eyes. Her feet felt rooted to the spot, even as badly as she wanted to flee.

Pyro gazed down at the mask, its gravity irresistible. It gazed back. Waiting.

 

* * *

 

The droning voice of the Administrator boomed through the speakers— _mission begins in ten minutes!_ —and Pyro jumped so hard she fell off the gurney.

Her first pained and panicked gasp as she scrambled to push herself upright got her a lungful of formaldehyde-flavored air. Collapsing again, she lay wheezing until the stink became bearable. Only then did she manage to roll over and prop herself up onto her hands and knees, staring around at skinny metal legs and cobwebby corners.

She was shivering. A proper look at herself revealed she was not wearing her suit, or much of anything, for that matter. Her bra was intact, and her jeans and socks, but everything else appeared to have been replaced by a white sheet that had tangled up her legs. She blinked blearily at her breasts, trying to remember what the hell had put her here.

_The cleaver sunk into the space between her lenses with an ugly, wet thump._

A shudder tore through her, one that was more than just cold. Pyro put her hand to her forehead before she could stop herself. Dried flecks of blood came away, but there was no pain.

It took her a while, but eventually she managed to pick herself up, hauling the sheet around her bare shoulders for what little warmth it would give her. She was in the infirmary. She must have been carried here because she sure as hell wouldn’t have been walking—the thought made her grimace. If she tried she could pull up the briefest images of frostbitten windows, the flash of the knife as it came for her, the black metal of something crushing the blade.

Peering around the room, she found her suit: bloodstained and strange-looking, folded at the foot of the gurney she had fallen from. Her boots lay in a discarded heap a few yards away. She pulled both on in an automatic sort of way, still trying to remember. What had happened after that? Something—something bad—

_She was slipping, she could feel it, there was nothing she could possibly do to stop it. Something huge held her flat against something cold and everything hurt, every breath sent hideous shrieking agony through every nerve in her body and all she could hear was her own sobbing all she could see were bloodstained ceiling tiles and those were lifting away one by one by one and behind them rushed a neon vortex vast and infinite and carrying her off and God, oh, God she embraced it, she let it take her, she begged it to. She did not step through the looking-glass so much as she leapt through it._

Pyro cringed, trying and failing to block out the fuzzy Wonderland memories that came surging back. She had never even liked Carroll. It wasn’t fair.

And now here she was. She blinked, inhaled the chilly air, and realized her mask was nowhere in sight.

When the locker room door shut behind her, the team just glanced at her before returning to their pre-battle preparations. An instant later they all jerked their heads up again, eyes wide. Pyro looked from one shocked face to the next, and reached up to pull some stray hair behind her ear.

No one said a word. Not even Scout, though she wondered if he could have even gotten anything out around the vicious sneer his mouth had twisted into. For a few seconds she met his stare, the rest of the team forgotten, waiting for him to level the pistol in his hand at her. In the end, though, he only spat onto the floor and hissed something under his breath before turning away.

The rest of the team continued to stare, but the tension seeped out of her. With it went most of her energy. Crossing the five or so yards between her and the lockers reminded her of slogging through mud. When she finally got to her gear, she looked at it without really recognizing any of it at first. But that came, too, eventually. Flare gun on the belt, yes, ammo in the pouch on her waist, axe through the belt. Her new flamethrower shined at her in the light like everything was fine.

At last she picked up her oxygen tank. Here she stalled, her routine interrupted. She wasn’t wearing anything to feed oxygen into.

Weren’t there supposed to be more masks in here? She checked the top cubby and the drawer below, and even behind the sledgehammers crowding the bottom of her locker, but there was nothing. In the end she found herself blinking down at the gray-and-gold tank again.

What the hell was she even doing here?

Someone was next to her. She looked up. “Hey, ah—Pyro,” Demoman said. There was something wrong with the lilt of his words, but more than that Pyro realized this was the first time she had ever seen Demo without her lenses between them. She could see the grain of the fabric of his eyepatch, the individual hairs of his stubbled jaw. It felt wrong. “Is this what you’re after?”

She dragged her eyes over to where his hand rested on something hanging on the side of the lockers. Black, rubber. The lenses were watching her. She flinched. But in the end she reached out to take it anyway. There was nothing else for it.

The way Demo’s hand darted away from hers did not escape her. When she pulled the mask back on and looked at him again, it felt just as wrong as not having it on.

The sirens wailed. She was the last one to leave.

No one spoke to her after that. It was just as well: she was not sure she would have noticed. The whole day she was in a kind of stupor, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. She didn’t even die.

Working hours were nearly over when she trudged back toward their base after a brutal engagement with the RED medic. She had won at the cost of a huge chunk of her arm and all of her ammo. If Engineer’s nest hadn’t moved it would be just inside the warehouse, on the left by the ramp, and even though she wanted to just drop and bleed out she made the walk anyway. She wasn’t sure why. There didn’t seem to be a point.

She had just pulled herself inside the door and was near to the mouth of the warehouse that held their second point when a noise stopped her. No, not a noise. A voice. She hesitated, then peered around the corner.

The nest had moved, now against the far end of the wall. The voice had been no one else but Scout. The distance was just far enough and her ears were ringing just loud enough that she couldn’t make out what he was saying, but she didn’t need to in order to tell he was yelling himself blue in the face. Across from him, leaned up against those big storage containers with his arms crossed and absolutely no expression, Engineer listened.

Hanging back at the edge of the doorway, Pyro spied on them, trying not to be obvious. For all his hollering Scout seemed to be having no effect. At first, anyway. As she watched he dropped his voice enough that she could no longer hear it at all. Whatever it was he said might as well have been a bomb. Engineer’s calm shattered. He snapped something in answer, brandishing his metal hand at Scout like a weapon, and Scout responded with more snarling and a waving bat. Things got louder.

 

 

“—and you _knew_! This whole fuckin’ time you knew about it and I—”

“—didn’t know a godforsaken thing about her and your brother! And it ain’t like you ever even—”

“—goddamn cared! You don’t care about anyone on this whole frickin’ stupid team anymore except that sick ugly freak! Everyone knows it, everyone knows you don’t give a rat’s ass anymore—”

Pyro could feel herself getting tenser as the argument escalated, something deep inside her begging her to shrink away and hide. Before she could try and escape, though, the air rippled between her teammates. Spy appeared.

Both of them shut up in an instant, glaring at him. He glanced from one to the other and said something, and gestured toward the door. Toward Pyro.

All three of them looked her way. Seizing up, she looked back. Eventually Spy spoke again, and whatever it was, it was enough to break their attention. Scout muttered something and ran left, full-bore, disappearing up and behind the ramp. Spy faded back out of existence. Engineer pointed those expressionless goggles at her one more time before turning away. When she at last dragged herself over to the nest, no words were exchanged. At least the dispenser welcomed her.

For the next two hours her mask itched. It was bad enough she wanted to rip it off and fight without it, but the thought frightened her, and smoke inhalation would send her to respawn quicker than just about anything else anyway. When the final whistle blew and both teams fell back to their respective bases, though, she tore it off as soon as she was in the door. If the team cared, she didn’t notice.

She showed up to dinner without it, too. When Scout saw her he made a show of picking up his plate and stalking out of the room. She watched him go, then went and found a place at the table between Heavy and Soldier. The meal passed. No one spoke.

Pyro was pushing her last overcooked carrot around on her plate when someone finally said something: “Well.” She lifted her head to find the speaker and was met with Engineer, goggles down around his neck, his gaze already on her. Bags lurked under his eyes. “I guess no one else wants to say it, so I s’pose I will. We’ve heard Scout’s version of things, Pyro. You want to tell us yours?”

Every other pair of eyes on the table slid over to her. The urge to get up and leave was incredible. “What version?” she said after too long of a hesitation, putting her fork down. “Do you want me to tell you he’s lying?”

“Boy’s makin’ big allegations,” Sniper said, leaning back into his chair. “Sayin’ you murdered his brother, and all, I’m sure you’ve heard.”

Her temples were starting to ache. She sank deeper into her chair and did not look at any of them. “I set a fire. It killed his brother.” The air felt rigidly silent. Frozen. It was all she could do to keep herself still, unwilling to run but afraid to stay. “The end,” she finished. The words scraped her throat.

She counted the seconds. Six, seven, eight. She was on twelve when thunder rumbled beside her.

“You said to me it was an accident.”

Heavy’s words carried right through the floor, up through her boots. It startled her into speaking, looking up to see him peering down at her. “It …” Her eyes cut across the seven other faces again. She could not determine anything from them. “… it, yeah. It was, I mean, I didn’t—I didn’t want to hurt him.” She swallowed, looking down at her plate. “We—we were … friends.”

“Why don’t you give us your side of the story, then,” Engineer said quietly.

Pyro’s head began to pound. She swallowed again, dug her fingers into her legs, and closed her eyes.

“I met him because I got off at the wrong bus stop.” All the words felt misshapen as they left her mouth. “He was selling fireworks. He … I kept running into him. All this weird shit happened. Once we were on a bus and it crashed and I …” She trailed off, then shook herself. “… anyway we got—I guess we got to be friends. I think. He came over for the fourth of July, anyway.”

The degree to which her voice warped as she said it was palpable even to her. Breaking off, she took a moment to breathe, to stamp down the rising memories. Her eyes stayed closed. “I’d bought all the fireworks he was selling the day we met. I don’t even know how many I had. A lot. I kept them in this old shed in my yard, and all my other fire stuff too, my fuel and my projects. It was falling apart. The shed, I mean. The wind could have knocked it over and I knew that but it never even occurred to me that it … God, I was so stupid, I …”

“Pyro,” someone said, quiet, nearby. She couldn’t tell who with the way her skull was throbbing.

“We set the fireworks off,” she said once she had grounded herself. “Some of them. I burned my hands on a sparkler, so he went to get the rest out of the shed and I was messing around with these big rockets that we hadn’t set off yet and they … I guess they went off wrong. I can’t remember all of it. But one of them hit the shed.”

Her throat had at some point in her speech become as dry as the Badlands, her fingers snarled up in the fabric of her suit. She thought she could feel the scars on her palms pulsing. “I had more fuel than a gas station in there. The shed blew up. Everything burned. Everything. My house, the yard. The trees. And him.”

Even with her eyes shut the world seemed to be spinning, now. “I didn’t know who Scout was when I got here,” she went on. “When I figured it out, I. I tried to hide. Pretend I was someone else.” It was not, technically, a lie. “But I screwed everything up. It was a stupid idea to begin with. I told him who I was and all of it a couple of days ago because I’m sick to my fucking teeth of being a coward and he always deserved to know anyway.” At last she opened her eyes, raising her hands and then dropping them back down into her lap helplessly. “And then he put a butcher knife in my head and I don’t h—h-have any fucking idea why you guys stopped him.” She was going to be sick. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I shouldn’t be on this team.”

Seconds passed.

“Well,” said Engineer.

Around her the team started to shift and to move, slowly, as if waking up.

Even that little sound was too much for her shattering nerves. All her will had flickered out, used up. Pyro rose, avoiding any kind of eye contact, and left as quickly as she could without running.

She had barely made it out the door when it happened.

“PYRO!” bellowed a voice, followed by boots slamming the linoleum. The sound alone nearly made her bolt, but for the fact that the man calling her was not at all who she would have expected. Someone grabbed her shoulder just as she turned, baffled.

“S—Soldier?”

The hall light was not on; Pyro stood mostly in shadow, and with the canteen at his back Soldier was reduced to a silhouette. She could just make out the flat slash of his mouth beneath the helmet. His grip on her grew tighter. For a few seconds he stayed exactly like that, and she was so dumbfounded all she could do was gape. Then: “Pyro,” he said again, in a voice uncommonly low and calm for him, “do you remember what I said yesterday?”

“I—what?”

“Do not ‘what’ me, ma’am! That was a direct inquiry!”

Pyro squinted at him, trying and failing to comprehend. She was so tired. It was hard to think. Her gaze skittered off to one side, searching for a way out. Before she could find one, Soldier had grabbed her other shoulder, tight but not painful. “What did I say?” he repeated.

Through the sliver of the canteen she could still see past him Pyro could make out the team watching them. “I don’t …” Why did Soldier have to pick right now to be ridiculous? “You said I was a good soldier.”

He shook her, more gently than she ever would have expected from him. “Correct! And what makes a good soldier, Pyro?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Courage,” he started. “Honor! Virtue! A good soldier stares certain destruction dead in the eye in the name of what is right even when the whole world tells him that he is insane! That is why there are so damn few of them. It is not easy! It is not simple! That is why we call it war!” She felt him squeeze her shoulders, emphatic. “So when you find that soldier, by God, you hold onto him. You keep him on no matter what.”

He let his hands fall from her arms, and she watched in exhausted confusion as he reached up to tilt his helmet back until his eyes were visible. His brow was a deep trench in his face, and the intensity in his stare, the bald-faced passion, was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Then his back straightened like a flagpole, and he gave her a salute so crisp he may as well have been a statue.

“You are a good soldier, Pyro,” he said gravely.

In the few seconds between his salute and the rest of the team starting to drift over to them, Pyro discovered her eyes had begun to sting. She was pawing at them and drawing loud, sniffling sorts of breaths as Demoman came up and Soldier relaxed his posture. “Hey now,” Demo said. His voice sounded right again, and he was smiling at her, a little. “Weren’t goin’ to just run off like that, were ye?”

She tried to answer, she really did, but with the way her throat was constricting the words got stuck. All she could do was shake her head and try to smile back.

Heavy joined them. Medic had followed, and shoved his way through until he was right in front of her. He gave her his shark grin, the only smile he seemed to possess. “Well, Pyro,” he began, “welcome back. I would very much like to discuss with you how exactly you were—”

A hand nearly as big as Medic’s head came to rest on his shoulder and he fell silent. He twisted around halfway to squint at Heavy, who just lifted his eyebrows. “Not now, doktor.”

Medic scowled for approximately a tenth of a second. Then he shrugged. “Ach, fine! Later, then. Fascinating story, Pyro. I do hope you and Scout won’t let a little thing like bad blood affect your performance.”

Before she could say a word, he had patted Heavy’s hand, shoved it off, and strode away into the base. Pyro stared after him as Heavy sighed. He said nothing more, but did catch her eye and give her a nod before setting after Medic.

By now Sniper had come over, too, Spy behind. It was getting crowded in the hall. “Always wondered why the bloke seemed like he had it out for you,” Sniper mused, taking a sip of his coffee. “Strange luck, you both endin’ up here.”

“Indeed,” Spy added. “You will, of course, need to resolve this with Scout. The team cannot survive so divided.”

Pyro sucked in her breath shakily, blinking hard as the worst memories of the last week flashed before her eyes.

“I—I’ll try.”

 

* * *

 

One by one they left her, disappearing into dark hallways. Demoman was the last to go, saying he would see if he couldn’t talk Scout down a bit for her. It sounded like a fool’s errand to Pyro, but she thanked him anyway.

Then she was alone. She could still feel where Soldier had held her shoulders. Gulping down the last of the lump in her throat and wiping at her eyes, it occurred to her to look back into the canteen.

She knew what she would find before she even turned her head, but it did little to mitigate the chill that ran down her spine when she saw Engineer still sitting at the table. From the doorway she tried and failed to meet his gaze, and wound up staring at her boots.

The squeak of a chair lifted her eyes again. She watched as he came toward her, thumbs in his belt loops. She couldn’t read his face for anything. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Apparently that was as far as he had planned. Pyro shifted her weight. Engineer chewed at his lip. “That was some story,” he said at last. “Explains—well. Just about everything, I guess.”

“I didn’t … want to tell them about the dispenser.”

He shrugged. “That’s up to you. Medic knows, though. Heavy too, I think. I reckon the rest of ‘em’ll start asking sooner or later. Two years is a long time to pretend to be outta your mind. Might wanna prepare for that.”

“I guess.”

After that neither of them said anything for a time. Pyro’s eyes kept returning to his right hand, and Engineer looked like there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t get it out. Eventually, though, he heaved a sigh and shook his head. “I’d, ah. There’s some things I got to talk with you about. Important things, I figure.”

“Right now?”

“No, nah, I—I’m sure you’re mighty tired. Been a long day for everybody. Tomorrow. That alright?”

“Okay. Yeah.”

The smile Engineer gave her almost looked real. She returned it as best as she could, and turned to leave. When he cleared his throat, she paused. “I do got one question.”

“What?” she said, looking back again. Engineer was studying the floor.

“Just, y’know. Scout don’t ever talk about his family, not since everything with the photographs—well, I guess you don’t know about that. Just he ain’t never given us any of his brothers’ names.” Pyro blinked at him, not sure where he was going with this. Engineer hesitated before looking up at her again. “I guess I’m asking what his name was. That friend of yours.”

“Does it matter …?”

“Call it curiosity.”

“Tobias,” Pyro said. “His name was Tobias.”

Slowly, Engineer nodded.


	27. 25: Heart

### 25\. "from the heart"
    
    
    1. _everything they said that night came from the heart_ ; deeply and sincerely, earnestly.

 

* * *

 

The next day turned out to be Saturday. The weekend took Pyro by surprise, but when she realized the sirens were not going to go off that morning she buried herself in her blankets and pretended everything was normal. Whatever “normal” was.

Eventually her empty stomach forced her out. She crawled out of bed, got dressed, and reached for her mask only to find it was not there.

Right.

She left her room without it.

The mess seemed a much different place in the morning. It was brighter and the air felt more clear. Spy was there, flipping through some catalog and smoking. He paid her no mind as she made some oatmeal and ate it right there, leaned up against the counter and taking the room in without the tint of her lenses. When she emptied the bowl, she licked the syrup off her lips and weighed how dangerous interrupting Spy might be.

Not quite enough to deter her, it turned out. “Have you seen Engineer?”

His eyes cut up to her, one eyebrow lifting and then dropping again. “I believe he mentioned the garage,” was all she got in answer, but it was enough. She dropped her bowl in the sink, still sucking sugar from her teeth, and went looking.

The garage was chilly and dark, but not unwelcomingly so. As Pyro shut the door behind her, she was met with the sight of someone leaned into the hood of Sniper’s truck. When a few seconds went by and he did not notice her, she called, “Did it break again?”

Engineer pushed himself up from out under the hood, pointing his goggles at her. He was slow to answer. “Oh,” he said, “oh, nah. Nah. Just following up.”

Nodding, she crossed the garage to him and stopped at his side. The motor was a dark mess of black metal, coiled hoses and grease, the last of which had stained Engineer’s hands. The right one gleamed with it. She shifted her weight, unsure of how to talk to him anymore. “So I guess … what did you want to talk about?”

He bit his lip, frowning down into the recesses of the engine. Maybe he didn’t know how to talk to her now, either. Then he dropped the hood. “Couple of things. I ain’t fond of the idea of doin’ it in here, though. Go get your coat, I’ll meet you outside.”

 

* * *

 

Unbroken gray blanketed the Alaskan sky, turning it one even shade of dreary. Pyro studied it as she waited for Engineer outside the garage, trying to find the sun. She still had not succeeded when he arrived, bundled up, now sans goggles. “All right?” he said as he joined her, and she nodded. Neither of them said anything else as they started through the snow, aimless, until a vast dark thing on the ground ahead of them told Pyro where they were.

They stopped at the edge of the remains. Snow-cloaked, the site looked more like the bones of some great animal than the charred barn it was. Pyro knelt and plucked out a black, frozen piece of wood, turning it over in her hand. Engineer said, “So are you just not going to be wearing the mask anymore? Just like that?”

Something about how he said it made her laugh. “What’s the point?” She turned a little to look at him over her shoulder, pointing at her face with the wood in her hand. “Everyone knows now. I don’t have anything left to hide.”

“I guess not.” He picked his way through the debris, kicking at the black skeleton of one of the support beams lying before him. It fell apart. “Why’d you do it? I mean—tell Scout, and all.”

Dropping the wood and getting up, Pyro caught up with him. She didn’t say anything until they had shuffled near to the center of the barn, where a curiously high mound of rubble stood. She stopped before it, hands in pockets. “He deserved to know, didn’t he?”

“I s’pose.”

“Do you remember that lighter I had? The one with the Bible verse?”

“I do.”

“It wasn’t mine.” She blinked, hard. “It was his. Scout’s brother’s, I mean. I don’t even remember how I got it. If he gave it to me or what. And when I joined BLU, Scout recognized it.” Her voice was getting quieter. “There was a fight. He took the lighter off me … he didn’t remember anything else when he respawned. Just that now he had the lighter. Then I started seeing things.” Pausing for breath, she snuck a glance at Engineer. He was watching the horizon. “I’d blocked it all out until the fight,” she went on eventually. “The fire and basically everything. I didn’t want to remember, either. I thought the dispenser might …”

“Y’know, you mentioned something to me about that around Christmas.”

The way he said it made Pyro think he was going to continue. A minute passed, though, and he said no more, so she looked down at the mound in front of her and crouched before it. Ashy snow clung to her hand as she began to uncover it. “I didn’t know it was going to turn me into an idiot,” she said at last.

“Well, how would you,” Engineer sighed. “That’s, ah. That’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He took a deep breath and moved closer to her, and she looked up at him, waiting. From this angle the shadows under his eyes seemed much darker. It was a little strange, her looking up at him instead of the other way around. “First thing I wanna do is apologize for the way I been acting,” he said. “I’ve been up on this high horse of mine for a long time now. I hope you can forgive me that. Now the thing is I—the thing is I ain’t been all straight with you.”

Pyro listened. He huffed out his breath, glancing away. “All that I said about looking out for you, I mean. When we had that argument. Doing right by you. Heh. It was true enough in the beginning.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know that saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’?” She nodded, hesitantly. Engineer chewed his lip. “It … you didn’t act much like a person those two years. And the thing was most of the time you didn’t remember anything I said or did. It got … it was easy to stop thinking of you as a person. To stop treating you like one.”

“… How did you treat me?”

His voice was soft. He would not look at her. “Real bad, some days.”

He offered no more, and Pyro found herself mute, unable to remember and afraid to ask. Eventually she turned back to the rubble, shoving the last of the debris off of it. Tarnished, sooty metal glinted back at her.

She hauled the old flamethrower up out of the shards of the crate, getting to her feet, and let it fall to the snow again with a thump that ash flying. Engineer leaned back. “Shoot. So that’s where it went.”

“I finished building it the night before he got killed,” she said quietly, nudging it with her foot. “It didn’t feel right to keep using it. He was there the first time I burned anything with it, too.”

“Your friend?”

“Yeah.”

When she looked up Engineer was still focused on the machine in the snow. “Anyway,” he said. “I just—well, it’s like you said about Scout, I figure. You deserve to know. And it weren’t my place to decide if you wanted to remember, either. I’ve done you wrong, is what I’ve done.” He did not lift his head, but his eyes were upon her now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all of it.”

Pyro put her boot on the flamethrower and rolled it over, looking at the way the tubing had half-melted and then frozen over. Nitrile rubber. She could remember that, but none of what Engineer was talking about now—flashes of fear, maybe shouting, all of it indistinct and blurry. Nothing more.

Real bad, he’d said.

Maybe it was better this way.

“Yeah,” she said at last. “Me too, Engie.”

Engineer exhaled, looking away again. He sort of shifted his weight, glancing first at her and then down at the snow, folding his arms. “Dell,” he said. At her blank stare he cleared his throat and added, “I mean—just Dell. Not Engineer. Not anymore.”

She squinted at him, thoughts grinding to a halt. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m leaving.”

“L—leaving, what? What?”

She got a shrug. “Going,“ he said. ”Quittin’. Vacating the premises. I’m off the team, Pyro, I’m done with it, all of it.”

“But—”

“It’s been a long time comin’ anyway. Whole team’s as sick of me as I am of them, too, I reckon, especially after all this. I’m worn out. I’m old.”

The wind began to rush around them. Pyro’s mouth had gone dry. It was hard to get the words out. “Where are you going?” He shrugged. “You—you can’t just—”

“Let’s say I got a better offer,” he said.

“Is that … what the spy was talking to you about the other day?”

His mouth contorted in an uncomfortable way. “Yeah. Yeah it was. I guess he wasn’t as quick as he thought on killing you.” At last he met her eyes again. He did look old. “He’s got—whoever he’s working for is the one got him to come poking around in the first place. Looking for ways to butter me up,” he said with a laugh that had no humor in it. “Guess it worked. Fixed you and all. Then all that went south and, y’know …”

There was nothing she could think to say. She just stared at him, face screwed up, trying to imagine a BLU team without its Engineer. “You can’t leave,” she said. “We’ll lose every match.” There was that laugh again. It petered out quickly. “I just got back. You can’t.”

“I already made up my mind, Pyro.” Any semblance of a smile left his face. This time he was the one to kneel down in front of the flamethrower, his knees settling in where her own had dented the snow. With his right hand he reached out and turned Shark’s bones over, examining it. “Y’know,” he said at last, “I remember watching you build this thing. Blew me clear away. Last thing I expected out of you was machine sense.”

“It’s about the only sense I’ve got.”

“Nah, that ain’t so. You got a damn lot of it, though.” He let the machine fall back down to the ground. “This place I’m going. As far as I can tell machine sense is what they’re after.“ Dell glanced up at her. ”Cushier job than this one, even. No more getting blown up, at least.” He looked back down at the old flamethrower. “Fresh start.”

The offer went unspoken, but it was there. Plain as day.

“I—that’s …”

The wind picked up.

“Just an idea,” Dell said gently. “Just a thought.”

“When … when are you leaving?”

“Not until tomorrow. More like Monday, I guess. Real early, say, four’o’clock.”

“Oh,” Pyro said. “Alright.”

 

* * *

 

They did not speak of it again once they returned to the base. Exhausted already, Pyro retreated to her room and stayed there, thinking. Lunch came and went, but she found she was not hungry. Her appetite was still missing in action when a gentle knock came at her door some hours later.

The sound startled her from her thoughts. She sat up in bed, debated ignoring it, and eventually hauled herself to the door.

“Evenin’!” said a cheerful voice as soon as the door opened, and Pyro peered up at a face with skin even darker than her own and one lone eye crinkling under a smile. “Want t’help me make dinner?” Demoman asked.

“Oh,” she said, reaching for an excuse and finding none. “I—yeah, why not?”

The “why not” became apparent when she scalded herself on the gas stove for the third time in forty-five minutes, distracted by the fire under the boiling vat of stew. She yelped and nearly toppled the pot before Demo intervened, helping her to the sink and its ice water before she could do any more damage. “Maybe no stoves next time, aye?” he said with a laugh, killing the fire and pulling bowls down from cupboards. “Sandwiches, that’s what we’ll do. An’ we’ll get Heavy!” Man makes ’em bigger than your head. That’s how you do it.”

Next time. Sucking on her fingers, Pyro just nodded.

In short order Demo was hollering for the team to come and eat. As they filed in, it came to her that she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since last night—perhaps that was the real reason she had holed up in her room again. It seemed impossible that nothing more would come of what had happened.

But as the men assembled, nothing of the sort came to pass. What did come to pass was Medic stopping to interrogate her about her scars—how they had been treated. “If at all,” he added, sort of tilting his head and leaning closer in to get a better look at them. “I am all for experimental medicine but whoever saw to them should be ashamed. They’re rather ghastly, aren’t they? If I didn’t know better I should say you let them get infected.”

“They’re not as bad as her fashion sense,” Spy said as he passed, plucking at a thread sticking out from her sweater. Next to him, Sniper snorted and said he couldn’t see anything wrong with it. In the next moment they had launched into a full-fledged argument about dress. Pyro watched them bicker all the way to the table, amazed. Soon enough she managed to excuse herself from Medic, grab a bowl, filled it near to spilling—suddenly she was starving—and made for the table. The first unoccupied chair she could find, which happened to be next to Soldier, squawked as she pulled it out.

“Calm down, Clarisse, she’s one of us,” Soldier grunted at the hen sitting in the chair. “And she outranks you, so move those tail feathers,” he added, reaching over and pulling it into his lap. Pyro had to bite her lip to keep herself from grinning too wide as she slid into the seat.

“What’s Clarisse’s rank?”

“Private first-class. She’s got a ways to go.” He scratched Clarisse’s head, shoveled a huge spoonful of stew into his mouth, and then launched into an explanation of the United States Army ranks so detailed and jargon-riddled that even when he claimed he himself was a combination Master-Seargeant-Fleet-Admiral-Deputy-Executive-in-Chief, she would have thought twice before questioning him.

It was like the last two days hadn’t happened, she thought as dinner wound down. Come to think of it she had not yet encountered Scout. Maybe he’d taken his food and skipped again—no, there he was, as far away from her as possible while still being seated at the table.

He was leaning forward on his elbows, spoon dangling from one hand as if forgotten and his eyes cutting back and forth across the room everywhere except where she sat. His bowl appeared untouched. Demo had seated himself next to him, and though she couldn’t hear it over the din of the rest of the team chatting among themselves it did seem as if he was trying to talk to him. If Scout heard a single word he made no sign of it.

When Scout’s gaze finally landed on her—her, watching him—it took everything she had not to flinch. He had the same bruised, dead look on his face that she’d seen just before he put the cleaver between her eyes. The world seemed to dim as they stared at one another. Tension crawled up Pyro’s spine like spider legs catching on her skin. It prickled. She wanted to shiver, to brush it away, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

Something nudged Scout’s arm. The spell broke. He whipped his head up to glare at Demoman, halfway to a snarl in an instant. Pyro took an unsteady breath and looked back down at her food.

A fresh start.

A fresh start meant no more BLU. It meant no more lighting people on fire and getting shot day in and day out, no more of the endless respawn cycle.

Mostly, though, it meant no more Scout.

Her thoughts ran in circles as she finished off her food, slow. When someone tapped her shoulder a few minutes later, she dropped her spoon. She stared at it, exhaled slowly, and turned to see who it was.

Heavy. Just Heavy, with a deck of cards in his hand. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. Pyro let herself relax. “Hey,” she said.

“Doktor and I are going to play Five Hundred,” he answered. “Do you know this game?”

“No, but I’ll play if you teach me.”

From the sink someone made a noise of disbelief. When Pyro looked over she was met with Sniper shaking his head. “Doesn’t know Five Hundred,” he said, shaking his sudsy hands dry. “That’s a crime in Australia. Honest, mate, they clap you in irons,” he added as Heavy chuckled. “Alright. Someone swap me for dishes, I’ve got to make sure these louts don’t go teachin’ her the wrong rules.”

One way or another Spy was coerced into the exchange, and within five minutes Pyro was scrabbling to keep up with Sniper’s coaching as cards were dealt and bids placed. It was a team game, she learned quickly, and one based on subtlety and being able to read the cues of your partner. Even with Sniper as her opposite they lost the first three games miserably. By then she had managed the hang of it, though. When the pair of them took the next three rounds and proceeded to win nearly every bid in the fourth, Medic tossed down his cards and declared that he was going to bed.

When Medic left, so did Heavy, heading toward the lockers to clean Sasha. By then the commons had dwindled down to just her and Sniper, and Sniper said, “Well, now we’ve only got one mystery man left on the team, haven’t we?”

Pyro slowed as she slid the cards back into their box. “Who—Spy? Yeah, I guess so.” Without really thinking about it she reached up and ran her hand through her hair, then tossed the deck onto the table. “I like not having to repeat myself all the time.”

“It’s an improvement,” he said. “Whole thing is, really. I’d rather have a teammate won’t saunter off after butterflies when I need ’em covering my back.”

“God, is that something I did?” Pyro said with a wince. Sniper waved her off.

“No worries. I’m not one to dwell. Now,” he said, leaning forward on his knees and looking at her very seriously, “I know what I said in the kitchen. But that bloody sweater of yours really is a travesty, you can’t just cut the sleeves like that, and the size …”

He spent the next five minutes meticulously outlining all the ways her sweater was falling apart, how many sins she’d committed in regards to knit garments, and closed by demanding to know what size she actually was so he could knit her a proper one, because “I could lose a whole dog in there with how big the bloomin’ thing is on you.” Pyro had to bite her knuckle the whole time to keep from laughing.

Her rebuking over, their conversation passed into other things, meandering all over the map until she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Like as not she would have just gone to sleep in her chair, except for the thought that Scout might find her that way in the middle of the night. They said goodnight, and once she got to her room Pyro was blissfully asleep before she hit the pillow.

Sunday passed quietly. She spent most of it copying down the letters from one of the magazines laying around. If she just did it long enough maybe her literacy would come back—but no. She wasn’t sure how much time passed until she scratched the damn things out and started doodling instead. Art was not her forte, but it passed the time, and anyway she had to do something with all those crayons.

Dinner came courtesy of Spy, something involving whipped potatoes and garlic and cured ham. Pyro managed to avoid Scout’s gaze this time, and Engineer’s, too. Afterward she helped Heavy with the dishes. “It’s weird,” she told him as they were finishing up. “I thought, you know. I didn’t think things would feel like this after everything happened.”

“‘Like this’?”

She made a vague gesture with one hand, flicking water off her fingers. Her eyes fell on the scars on her palm. “Normal, I guess. I thought everyone was going to take Scout’s side. You’ve known him longer. And better.”

“If it had been murder, perhaps,” he said, handing her another plate to be dried. “But: you have said two times now that it was an accident.”

“But it’s just my word against his,” Pyro said, shaking her head. “I don’t get it. You guys don’t even know me. Not really.”

Heavy passed her another handful of silverware. As she scrubbed the forks and knives through her towel, he said, “We are team. Who do we trust if not each other?”

She had no answer to that, and only took the next dish as he finished it. And then: “Do you think Scout would ever forgive me?”

Heavy looked over at her, studying her. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t asked. “I am not Scout,” he said at last. “This, I do not know.”

“Do you think it’s even worth trying?”

“To ask forgiveness? Always.”

 

* * *

 

At 3:43AM, Pyro quietly opened her door, peered both ways to make sure no one was around, and slunk down the dark hall. Every step felt too loud, and any moment she expected to turn a corner and be met with one of her teammates—Sniper up late, maybe, or Scout somehow waiting for her.

No one appeared the whole trek down to the garage, though. She reached its door and for a moment stopped to study the light pooling in under it. Touching its handle, she eased it open.

She was greeted with two sounds: the gentle hum of Sniper’s truck, and the soft murmur of the wind as it drifted past the open garage door. A stack of crates that had not been present the last time she’d been here sat by the truck’s back tire. Shutting the door behind her, she took a few slow steps across the cement, looking around. A sound from the back of the truck drew her attention, and as she went toward it out stepped Dell, brushing off his hands on his overalls. He went still as he saw her, and a tired smile—a real one at last, a genuine one—lit up his face. “There you are.”

Pyro said nothing as she reached him and the crates, touching one idly. The wood was rough and cold under her hand. “Is this all your stuff?”

“Just about, yeah.” She could feel his eyes on her. “I got more if you need one.”

“I’m not coming, Dell.” Bringing herself to look him in the eye after she said it was almost painful, but she forced herself to anyway. She watched his expression dim, his face muddling in confusion. “I just came to say goodbye.”

He was quiet. At last he drew in his breath and exhaled it again in a long, slow sigh. “I see,” he said, low enough it was almost lost under the wind and the engine. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Even after what Scout did to you?”

“Scout isn’t the whole team,” she said. “I thought about it. But I decided this is where I want to be right now.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, shrugging. “I want to try and fix things. With Scout, I mean. I’m not going to run again.”

For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Dell nodded—hesitant at first, and then with more resolve. “Alright,” he said. “Alright. Well.” He looked at the crates, still stacked high, and to Pyro he seemed small next to them. “I guess I’m the one running now, aren’t I. Well.” He heaved another sigh, fog against the early-morning air. “Mind helping me with these, at least?”

She did not mind. Together they loaded the back of the truck in silence, and as they pushed the last one in and shut the door Dell said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about this. Breaking contract all over the place. Don’t want you to get in trouble neither. BLU’s gonna be on my tail quick as anything.”

“Okay.”

“And I ain’t gonna be able to take that mutt of mine where I’m going. He always liked you better. Maybe you could look after him for me.”

“Sure.”

He shuffled his feet. “If they don’t find it you might wanna let Sniper know his truck’ll be down in Miut—”

“You’re stalling,” Pyro said softly.

Dell stopped short, surprise plain on his face. He laughed, a little. “Well. Maybe so. Goodbyes haven’t ever been my strong suit.”

He led her over to the driver’s side of the truck, tugging the door open. A burst of warm air unfurled over them. Pyro swallowed. “Will I see you again?”

“I truly don’t know.”

Slowly, she nodded. “Then I guess—goodbye.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking off out through the open garage door before returning his gaze to her. “I guess so. Goodbye, Pyro.”

He had made to turn when Pyro reached out on impulse, taking his left hand in both of hers. It was a motion that felt familiar, strange as it was for her. His hand was warmer than she would have thought, his skin pale next to hers, machine-roughed and calloused all to hell. Her brow knit—she could feel his eyes upon her but couldn’t make herself meet them. “Um,” she said. “We’re okay, right? You and me?”

It felt like ages before she dared look up at him. She did so in time to see the surprise slide off his face, replaced with a sad sort of smile. He squeezed her wrist. “Yeah. I think we are.”

 

 

Pyro’s answering nod was a long time in coming, and the return smile longer, but they got there.

And that was all. She let go, and Dell climbed into Sniper’s truck. The headlights blinked on, and he gave her a final wave.

As he drove off into the winter night, she followed him as far as the pool of yellow light in front of the garage, watching him until he was just a faint glow vanishing behind the trees.


	28. Interlude III.

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

 _—Worstward Ho,_  Samuel Beckett.


	29. Epilogue

**EPILOGUE**

 

* * *

 

The morning sun glittered on the snow, turning everything dazzling and beautiful. Pyro stepped into the light, aiming to loop around to try and take the enemy by surprise, and just as she did the speakers crackled. “RED has seized all control points,” the Administrator said in a bored voice. “Finally. BLU has failed.”

Great. Pyro let her flamethrower’s muzzle drop to the snow, hissing out her breath. Without Dell, it hadn’t even taken them an hour to lose. The moment the RED team had realized there was no sentry nest anywhere their assault doubled. Even now she could hear the whooping of the victors from BLU’s final point.

Breakfast that morning had been terse and uncomfortable. No one had any idea where their engineer and the entirety of his equipment and belongings had vanished to. Pyro kept her mouth shut, and shook her head when they asked if she knew. When Sniper found his truck missing, that told them all they needed to know anyway. “Kind of wondered if this was gonna happen,” she had heard him say to Demo, who made a solemn noise of agreement. “S’pose I’ll ask him about it next I see him.”

But now it was over—they could go home. As she moved to head back for the base, Pyro wondered what would become of her. She had no place of her own, as far as she could remember—her memory offered flashes of staying at Dell’s farmhouse in Texas, or sometimes at the BLU headquarters. One was now impossible, and the other unappealing. She didn’t even know where it was. But she’d been getting paid for the last two years, surely. Maybe if she was lucky she had some of that money in a bank account somewhere.

Something jangled against her foot as she picked her way through the snow and interrupted her thoughts. Whatever it was had caught around her boot, so ice-crusted she couldn’t tell what it was. As she knelt down to investigate she thought it might be a thread, or a snapped catgut from one of Sniper’s bows.

It was neither. It was something else entirely. Pyro stayed there in the snow for a long time, turning it over in her hands.

 

* * *

 

Policy stated the losing team had to be out of the territory within twenty-four hours. A truck would be arriving to cart them off to Miut’s airport in five, Pyro learned when she got back to the base. Lots of time to kill, but it slipped away fast. It took her an hour to gather all her belongings and weapons and pack them, and she filled the next three with helping to clean the base before they left. By the time they were done her time had dwindled to an hour, and she was left looking around her barren room and fiddling with the thing she had found in the snow.

The smart thing to do would be to give it to one of her teammates. Have them do it. Any of them would understand why she didn’t want to.

But, apparently, she hadn’t learned her lesson yet. When she at last squared her shoulders and flipped her light off for the final time, her own words echoed in her head like a death sentence:

_I want to try and fix things._

 

* * *

 

With the base dark and emptied, most of the team had holed up in the commons to wait out their ride’s arrival. Most of them. It took Pyro a solid thirty minutes of searching to find Scout, and when she did, another five of looking at his back and convincing herself not to turn around.

She managed that, at least. Small victories.

When she opened the garage’s side door and went out to where he stood staring down the horizon, the sun was beginning to set. The sky was a blazing canvas of color, the sun burning the clouds up to pinks and golds and autumn-reds. If Scout heard her approach, he gave nothing away. Not until she stopped just a few steps away from him, looking out at the sunset herself.

“So what happened, Engie finally get sick of takin’ care of your stupid ass? That why he left you behind?” Before she could even open her mouth Scout turned his head just enough to glare at her from the corner of his eye. There was a certain haggardness to his face she did not recognize—not the same dead look as before, but perhaps second cousin to it. “Or did he just decided to get away from you before you did him like you did my brother?”

The words stung, but Pyro met his gaze. None of the answers that ran through her head seemed sufficient. In the end, she just shrugged. Scout snorted, a puff of dragon-smoke on the frigid air. “Yeah, sure. Put your damn mask back on, no one wants to look at that thing you’re callin’ a face. The hell do you even want?”

She supposed that was meant to hurt, too, but the way he said it was so hollow that she just felt sorry for him. Shifting her weight, she glanced down at the snow and took a deep breath before reaching into her pocket. “I found these on the field today,” she said, holding out the silver dog tags. “They were buried in the snow by that little bridge.”

Scout’s eyes widened as they fell on the tags. An instant later he had ripped them out of her hand and darted a few steps back, head bent as he inspected them. Each passing second darkened his expression more and more. At last he shoved them deep into his pocket, sneering at her. “Found ’em?” he said. “ _Found them_? You expect me to believe that shit, you expect me to—you goddamn freak you wanna tell me that you found his lighter on the ground too?” Both his hands had clenched into fists as he took a step toward, then another and another, his volume increasing with each one. Pyro stood her ground. “You—you’re a goddamn psycho, first his lighter and now my tags! My—”

“Aren’t they his tags?”

Scout sputtered, mouth hanging open like he couldn’t believe she’d interrupted him, but she wasn’t looking at him now. Her eyes were locked on the ghost standing beside him, all burns and blood.

“Don’t they have his name on them?” she said, trying to remember. The ghost tilted his head to one side. “I thought he used to wear some. He—”

“Shut up,” Scout said. Something was wrong with his voice. “Just—just _shut up!_ You don’t—you don’t get to talk about him, you hear me, don’t you even dare go thinkin’ you can just—” He broke off, grit teeth cutting off anything else he might have said. After a moment he swallowed and straightened up, leaning into her face. Pyro tore herself away from the ghost to look at Scout again. “You did all of this,” he growled. “You screwed up the team, it’s your fault Engineer went AWOL, it’s your fault we lost—you ruined my family, you broke my ma’s heart, _you killed my brother_ —”

He spat in her face. Pyro flinched but did not look away. “You better hide real good after we’re outta here,” Scout hissed. “You better goddamn _disappear_ , because—”

“No,” Pyro said. She reached up and wiped the spit from her scarred cheek with the back of her wrist. “I’m done with that. But I won’t talk about him. And I’m sorry about all of it. But I’m part of this team as much as you are and I’m not going anywhere.”

Her answer silenced him. For a few seconds longer Scout glowered at her with fire in his eyes, but when she stepped back from him he did nothing to stop her. The ghost was still there beside him, but this time she chose not to see it.

The sun had vanished. Out on the horizon, a slowly moving light trundled up the mountain. Pyro sighed, nodding toward the base. “Come on,” she said. “The truck’s here. Let’s go back.”

 

 

**THE END**

 

* * *

  

Dedicated to the admirable Noel B., who is always right, and to the memory of Ray Bradbury, without either of whom this story would not have come to be, and to all of you who have traveled here with the arsonist.

  
_There Is A Season_  continues in Part III: Fall.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [let nothing you dismay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008529) by [PreludeInZ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/PreludeInZ)




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